Serenity felt his attention dissolve as he tried to manage four bodies at once. It wasn’t easy in his Sovereign form, but it was far easier. He’d practiced over the past few weeks, once he knew this was the best option he had, and for this his hard-won control should be good enough. He didn’t actually have to watch what was going on with four bodies and they didn’t have to move differently; all he had to do was float somewhere in each pool. For that, doing the same thing with each body would be fine, especially since he’d float in his dragonling form.

He extended his wings a bit and tipped himself towards his back. It wasn’t exactly the most natural floating position for a dragon, but he could make it work and it would keep his face well clear of the water. He was glad he’d practiced exactly this in other pools in the Water Gardens.

He really should have practiced the splitting and floating at the same time; it was a little more difficult than he’d expected since he hadn’t landed in the water identically. He was still able to push himself onto his back; from there, he’d be fine.

Fortunately, Serenity’s mana sense wasn’t bothered by the discontinuity; he’d tested it and it was a relief to know that reality lined up with his expectations. Serenity could feel the ritual; it was still beginning and the mana pushed into the circle by Lykandeon hadn’t hit any of his changes yet. That was positive; it meant he had time for what he wanted to do.

Lykandeon’s ritual was theft as far as Serenity was concerned. Theft on a grand scale, perhaps, but still theft. Lykandeon probably thought of it as buying Eternity, but Serenity knew he was doing no such thing. In the long run, the ritual would destroy Lykandeon’s power by adding in small flecks of different Intent that weren’t properly aligned to Lykandeon’s own Intent. If the ritual had been perfectly implemented, Lykandeon might have been able to avoid that issue, but it wasn’t even particularly close.

The long run, however, could be a very long time and Serenity wasn’t willing to wait for it.

The concepts used for the ritual were advanced but clearly not completely understood by the person who designed the ritual. Death into Life was famous for a reason; making Life and Death markers on a wheel rather than truly opposing forces was quite accurate in a lot of cases. The ritual took that concept and twisted it, saying something closer to “you die so that I may live”; the flaw was present in the formulation, where it encoded the opposition of the one who dies and the one who lives while also relying heavily on the transition of Death-into-Life and Life-Into-Death.

Serenity suspected the ritual was originally designed as a sacrificial healing ritual; the little death of an injury becoming the restoration of life in an injury. For a relatively superficial use like that, the long-term contamination would be handled simply by waiting for it to heal. The ritual would have limited uses, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t useful. A hundred people taking on a small surface injury might allow one person’s broken leg to be quickly healed, for example. The ritual’s design was certainly expansive enough to allow for that sort of spread, even if that wasn’t how Lykandeon was using it.

The prisoners Serenity had seen confirmed Serenity’s guess on the ritual. Lykandeon would kill them in the central pool and the mana released by their deaths would be caught by the ritual and sent to the outer pools. Once all of the pools were full or Lykandeon ran out of people to kill, it would reverse direction and flow back to Lykandeon, turning from the energy of Death into the energy of Life, healing and revitalizing Lykandeon and likely extending his lifespan.

It was horribly inefficient and wasteful even before the fact that Lykandeon was significantly higher Tier than the people he was killing, which would further degrade the return. Serenity couldn’t see the point. Even if he disregarded the slight but probably accumulating damage it would do to Lykandeon’s Intent, Serenity doubted the deaths of the eighty or so prisoners would give Lykandeon more than a few extra months of lifespan, even though they were young.

The ritual’s design had determined Serenity’s plan; there was a way to turn it on its head with a few simple alterations and his own specialty in Death magic. He doubted he could outright kill Lykandeon with it, but he could definitely hurt the god, and if he was hurt enough more options would open up.

He was also confident that even at the lower end of the possible damage, Lykandeon would be in no shape to think straight and know he had to find someone messing with the ritual in time to catch Serenity. It was possible that he would eventually find the alterations, but there should be no way to connect that uniquely to Serenity; he wasn’t the only person who frequented the Water Garden. There was a small level of risk, but that was one of the reasons Ita was at the Tower of Broken Swords.

Serenity watched the mana flow past him. At first, the mana shined a golden green like Lyka’s core, yet it shed filaments of gold. Serenity took his time examining it; he knew that particular golden color as the color of divine mana, but it shouldn’t be mixed with another color. It almost looked like it was Lyka’s core that was divine, rather than Lykandeon, but that was clearly also not the right answer.

It had to be Lykandeon’s own mana, using the Arcane affinity, since only a few Affinities would work for the ritual and the ritual would feed back onto whoever supplied the mana. The color said something about Lykandeon and how he saw himself; he had clearly linked himself to Lyka, even if he didn’t seem to care about the planet at all.

The other odd thing about the possibly holy mana was that it felt weak and incomplete somehow. It felt strangely like the atmosphere in the room where Serenity had met Lykandeon, the same room that held Aeon’s core. It seemed likely that it was connected somehow, but Serenity would need quite a bit of time with it to figure out how. Perhaps he’d have a chance to look into Aeon’s core if he managed to deal with Lykandeon instead of simply weakening him.

Death mana appeared at the western pool first, but it arrived at the other pools moments later. As it appeared, Serenity triggered Eat Death with each of his bodies. He’d do more with the Death-attuned mana he was accumulating later, but for now he needed to limit the amount of Death-attuned mana heading out from the center to the edges; with the changes he’d made, the unattuned mana mana was necessary to ‘escort’ the Death-attuned mana through the filter points. If he separated them and made the Death-attuned mana carry his signature instead of Lykandeon’s, it would back up at the filter points, drastically slowing down the Death-Into-Life at the edges.

The proportion of Death-attuned mana to unattuned mana was higher than Serenity had expected, but that didn’t matter; he needed Lykandeon’s mana to back up the filters. If he added his own, he’d just be undoing all the work he’d done.

It took twenty-six minutes for enough unattuned mana to pass Serenity that he was confident the filters were well clogged and wouldn’t be able to process much before the eclipse’s totality was over. That was when Lykandeon would trigger the next stage of the ritual, probably by killing the highest Tier of the prisoners as he pulled the now supposedly Life-attuned mana from the Death-into-Life pools at the edges back to himself in the final loop of Life-into-Death. A combination of that suction and additional unattuned mana would force the remaining Death mana through the filters while creating a cyclical flow of Death-into-Life that reinforced the central conceit of the ritual.

Of course, that was when the ritual hadn’t been interfered with. With Serenity’s little additions, the unattuned mana clogging the far reaches of the ritual circle would stay essentially still and Death would flow back, with its speed increasing as more Death was added to the cycle. It was relatively simple to convert Death-into-Life-into-Death into Death Begets Death, after all. The remaining Life influences and cyclical tendencies would both shift into Begetting and Becoming, while Death stayed unchanging.

The timing was important; there was a reason Lykandeon started the ritual at totality and would finish it almost an hour later with the Aeon’s Sun’s return; the Sun could be a symbol for Life, which made the eclipse an excellent symbol for Life-into-Death followed by Death-Into-Life. He could have used nightfall and sunrise as the two times just as easily, but Aeon’s eclipses were far shorter than its nights.

On top of that, it was entirely possible that the original ritual called for an eclipse for truly powerful workings. While Serenity knew how to adjust for celestial symbology that was accurate but not perfect without significant loss, most ritual designers stuck to the basics and some would only ever use the “most powerful” option even if it wasn’t as well suited to the ritual’s actual purpose.

Rituals were expensive, so only time and practice could give the experience to alter them on the fly. Serenity had that practice. Rituals were the Final Reaper’s specialty, just as much as Death magic was.

Serenity released his grasp on the Death-attuned mana he held; since he’d eaten it, he’d also taken control of it and it would resonate as if it were his mana instead of Lykandeon’s. He fed it into the ritual alongside the cleansed mana from Lykandeon and confirmed that they did not mix; while they both ran through the ritual, they were next to each other instead of augmenting each other.

This was a common flaw in group-cast rituals that Serenity had encouraged in this one instead of mitigating. Normally, getting the mana to mix and blend correctly would create a positive synergy. In this case, keeping them separate let him hide his own ritual inside Lykandeon’s without making it at all obvious. He kept using Eat Death to remove the Death attuned portion of Lykandeon’s mana; it probably wouldn’t compromise his own ritual at this point but there was no reason to take the risk.

Serenity’s Death-attuned mana flowed into the ritual just as Serenity had expected, which was both good news and bad news at the same time. While there was finally enough of Lykandeon’s unattuned mana clogging the edges of the ritual to make it the ritual Serenity intended to cast, he’d expected it to be done at least ten minutes earlier. This wasn’t yet outside the expected range, since Serenity had more Death-attuned mana in the pool created by Eat Death than he’d expected as well, but it was definitely not desirable. He was going to have to push the Death-attuned mana in faster, which meant he had to use his backup plan.

He couldn’t make the “pipes” of the ritual any bigger and they limited how much mana he could push in, especially with Lykandeon’s unattuned mana taking up part of the space. He needed more pressure.

Forcing a ritual tended to degrade the physical substrate, but Serenity didn’t care about that for this ritual. It was easily enough done at higher Tiers or with small rituals, but this one was simply too large for Serenity to overpower at Tier Four if he did it the normal way, even with the massive pool of Death-attuned mana he’d gained from Eat Death.

So Serenity opened four Rifts of Potential, then pulled from them, concentrating on Death-attuned mana. His Incarnate of Death settled comfortably around him and the Potential flowed from the Rift into the ritual. The Potential itself became the Potential for Death, mostly mana but partially essence.

Being surrounded by so much Death was a comfort he’d missed without realizing it.