“That… Construct-armor, of ours. It will not work. Not yet. To pursue its current design to the final iteration will be a labor of years. Our body is too weak to withstand the stresses of such a construct unprotected. But… That crooked path is not one we need to walk.”

Koschei spread his arms, and in an instant, great titans rose up behind him, vast skinless bodies armored in bone from whom rained a deluge of blood. Two titans. Three. Four.

Then, thousands, everywhere. Blood flooded everything.

“Strike me down, or be consumed!”

And so, Victor did.

Koschei’s thoughtform was skewered through-and-through. Ten-thousand Devil’s Teeth arced into the sky and came crashing down upon him until naught but ragged meat was left. The ground itself opened up and swallowed the titans which the Second King had conjured.

The Boneyard vanished. Victor stood face to face with Koschei upon an endless ocean of blood, spires of bone reaching for an empty sky above.

“Such vast cognitive pressure, if only I had known the secrets of these techniques in my own lifetime... I shall face my own defeat with dignity, at least - I shan’t just fade away, after all. I relinquish the other half of your inheritance, the half of my legacy which I jealously guarded so that only my true heir could claim to rule over all that which lives, over bone and flesh alike. I relinquish my authority as the Second of Three, Master of All That Lives… And with it, what little remains of the strength I held in life.”

Koschei’s face twisted into a wry grin.

“I pray that our body survives the metamorphosis.”

The undeniable reality of all-consuming pain dragged Victor out of his mindscape before he could question what those words meant.

As Victor lay there, his body began radiating an immense heat. Zel didn’t wait another moment before picking him up, making a judgment call: “Bring Jorfr. Something tells me we’ll need Vitae elixir. I’m taking him to the sauna ice pool.”

Zef nodded, and they split upon exiting their room. Zel took the redhead downstairs to the basement. Right next to the sauna was a room with a pool full of ice-cold water, for use after the sauna, and into the water she dunked him, fully clothed. She joined him in the water, standing right by his side with her arms beneath him to ensure he wouldn’t drown.

He had writhed in her arms even as she carried him, but not of his own free will; his very flesh was shifting under his skin, which itself was burning up and splitting at the seams down to raw meat. Thin ribbons of blood bloomed out within the ice-cold water as he floated there half-awake, staring off into empty space. Victor’s half-closed eyes shot wide open as brilliant-blue light surged through the veins beneath his skin, flickering, his body tensing up.

Another moment passed; teeth gritted in a grimace of struggle, pupils narrowed to dots. His hand shot up to his chest, slamming the palm straight onto the Antediluvian Gem. It ran his hand through right between the bones of the middle and ring fingers, breaking the plate on the back of his palm from within while also forcing it off of the skin like a giant nail. The force of the impact was such that it echoed in the chamber like a thunderclap and blood poured down his chest like a waterfall.

Zefaris and Jorfr barged in, the norseman already grinding spices in a mortar as he ran.

Bones popping could be heard from inside Victor’s body. He stiffly reached out his left hand moments before the Vitae elixir was finished, and kicked it back in an instant. Crimson flowed from his nostrils, his eyes and ears, from the seams between his bone plates and where they attached to his skin, and his skin itself continued to split and slough away in places as if his body were throwing it aside. Narrow jets of blood even erupted from seemingly unbroken spots. Its redness was run through with long, narrow ribbons of pale blue light, stretching out through the ice-cold water like a ghostly plant’s roots. The heat he was giving off was such that Zelsys was certain the water would boil at some point if it wasn’t constantly cycling, and that was the least of it.

His eyes became glassy, pupils dilating, a beastly shine behind them. The Primordial Self was in control.

“...Whatever is going on inside him, it’s a miracle it hasn’t torn him apart yet.”

“Subsuming a soul who knows how many times larger than his own was never going to be pretty,” Zel said. “Just being next to him feels like standing down in the Tree of Life Leyline Well.”

Transcendent.

That was the most appropriate term to describe the pain he was experiencing.

The physical pain, he could shut out with effort; though he hadn’t yet had the time to form a neural circuit for it, Victor nevertheless possessed that degree of control. As for the other, more complex, yet equally horrid sensations caused by what was happening within him, those he could not just ignore.

Musculature ripping itself to shreds and mending again. Bones melting and regrowing somehow even denser than they had already been in an instant, to the absolute limits of physical possibility and beyond through imbuement of pure Ossum into their matter. Joints popped out of place, veins and nerve paths reconfigured, everything that was his flesh violently changing in an effort to accommodate what his soul was becoming in these same moments.

It was the spiritual pain he couldn’t shut out, and which consumed him utterly. He couldn’t even process what was happening, let alone fully parse the nature or magnitude of it. By its sheer intensity his mind defaulted to interpreting it as an omnipresent, absolute burning, but it almost felt like his brain was just going back to what he had felt in Agartha as the closest point of comparison.

Koschei walked through the Boneyard.

Victor was his shadow.

Eons passed.

Victor walked through the Boneyard.

Koschei was his shadow.

Eons passed.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Neither identity could yet discern which led, and which followed.

The thoughtscape rippled and melted away, then reformed again.

The spires of Victor’s innermost mental fortress were now topped by great aquamarine rhombohedrons.

The Boneyard’s lakes were now tinged with the colour of blood.

Trees of bone and living flesh stretched into the heavens and held up a second sky of translucent dragonfly wing material, through which uncountable stars which were also eyes refracted into a kaleidoscope of colour shining down upon the thoughtscape. An ocean-blue dragoneye moon hung in the heavens.

Ziggurats and obelisks of blackstone dotted the horizon.

They arrived at a throne of burning bone in the midst of a pool of blood.

A third figure there awaited.

A giant wolf of bone, and flesh, and flaming rancor.

Its presence was a reminder.

It was Victor who walked, and Koschei who followed.