Return of the Runebound Professor-Chapter 803: Delight

Lorne drew in the hissing breath of a man torn abruptly from a deep, deep sleep. His eyes snapped open and his back went as straight as a rod. A dozen thoughts slithered through his head in a flurried rush. One or two of them might have even been coherent. That level of consciousness was considerably above average.

It was considerably more conscious than he had any desire to be. In Lorne’s professional opinion, it was more conscious than any organism in pursuit of a good life had any right to be. It was practically an unjust punishment.

To think was to create suffering. Very few good things had ever come from applications of the mortal mind. After all, everything good had already been created at some point long ago — or perhaps it had been finished in a few years from today.

Lorne could never quite remember. It depended on whether today came after tomorrow, and such considerations often bordered just a little bit too close to conscious thought for him to have any desire to ponder.

Minds were meant to frolic. To wander off and drift through the weave of being, unburdened by such bothersome things such as thoughts and troubles. They did not deserve to be burdened with what would come or what had already happened. Such material states of being were inevitable. Invariable.

Something would always happen. That was the manner of the universe. Perhaps an empire would rise. Perhaps it would fall. Perhaps it would persist through eternity or — more likely — perhaps it would not.

But something would.

And if something would happen, there really wasn’t any need to go worrying about what. The purpose of existence was to be free. The greatest achievement a human could ever achieve was to liberate themselves entirely of humanity. To simply exist and nothing more.

That was the code Lorne lived by on the days that he remembered he lived by a code. Unfortunately, the universe seemed to disagree with him. It insisted upon itself in a manner which was most displeasing to him.

The existence of existence itself was an insufferable inevitability. No matter how far he scattered his thoughts and mind, no matter how many shreds his consciousness tore itself into, it always demanded that he come back.

He was usually pretty good at ignoring that order. He’d gotten a lot of practice at it. Taken special care to ensure that he only had to waste his efforts on worthless things such as coherent thought as rarely and infrequently as possible.

To his great disappointment, that meant there were rare occasions in which he had to take action.

Times when his scrambled egg was unscrambled. And that itself was a deeply disgusting thought. Nobody unscrambled an egg. Only an evil man would wish to eat his egg whole and boiled. To selfishly consume it as a smooth orb of failed dreams. To deny its innate scrambled potential, to keep the marvelous textures and colors from mixing and becoming a work of art.

Such was the law of this vile, wretched universe. The twisted law that would haunt him for as long as he could remember — or perhaps it was the one that haunted him until he forgot. It was one of the two.

The universe demanded that his egg be unscrambled. And, until he tore it apart and built it anew, he would occasionally have to abide.

Lorne let out the breath he’d drawn in in a rattling sigh. Old weights settled in on his shoulders, hunching his back and grinding against his mind. Weariness wrapped itself in a familiar cloak around him.

Deep within Lorne, the fragmented pieces of his soul shifted. Memories bubbled. Thoughts straightened like bent pins being forced back into their old shapes.

He reached up to his face. Ran his hand along his rough features, across the wrinkled skin and the thick beard that had taken root within it. He felt the runes within his soul, felt the power rushing back in as the pieces of himself knit themselves back together.

The air around Lorne warped in a thick haze. Power crackled through his eyes with a hiss of regal crimson. He covered his eyes with his palm, squeezing them shut as pain warped his features into a grimace.

A hum filled the air. The guards in the room all around him took a step back, fear filling their gazes as the entire cave started to tremble. Stones clattered against the ground and dust rained from the ceiling as the earth itself shuddered awake.

And then Lorne’s hand fell. The heaving earth slammed to a halt and the pounding in his soul went still. Every single man in the room fell to their knees — though it was impossible to tell if that had been caused by respect or the immense pressure exploding out from within him.

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And then, for a single wretched moment, there was nothing but silence.

Lorne’s breathing stilled.

The final pieces of his soul clicked into place, finally squeezed into their original form for no more than a few horrible breaths.

His eyes opened.

But it wasn’t Lorne who awoke.

“Rise,” Orlen commanded, his voice cutting through the room in a whisper that bore the presence of a god. “The Herald has arrived.”

***

Moxie pressed her palms together. Her features were an unreadable mask as she drew every breath with slow, measured intention. Even though she had pulled her domain into herself, she could still feel the forest all around her.

She could sense the same power coursing through every single plant around her. It flowed just as truly as the blood did in her own veins. The power within existence was immense — but life was only half of it.

Life was potential energy. The first half of the equation, the precursor to what would inevitably come after, the rising hand on the eternal clock that would always swing down and then up once again.

Life begat death and from death would come life.

That was law.

Moxie pulled her hands apart.

The vines curled around her withered. They shrunk in on themselves, the vibrant flowers crumpling. Petals fluttered through the air, turning to dried husks well before they could hit the ground. Vibrant green paled and turned gray as a wave of death spread out from where she sat.

It came to a stop five feet away from her in every direction. Power coursed through Moxie’s being, racing to flow from her toes up through her heart and into her fingers before flowing back in the direction it had come.

The ring of gray rippled. New feelers sprouted from the ashen remains of the old ones, specks of green that quickly turned into an ocean. They rose up around her until not a single trace of the destruction she had wrought remained.

Moxie let out a slow breath and released her grasp on Eternal Cycle. The rune shuddered within her soul as its influence waned. She rose to her feet slowly, deliberately. Her grasp over its power had grown significantly over the past few months. Even though it wasn’t active, she could still feel the life around her.

She blew out a small breath as she adjusted the strap of the massive grimoire slung over her shoulder. Even though the huge book was impossibly light, it was still painfully unwieldy. She certainly wasn’t going to be winning any fashion contests with it over her shoulder.

But there was only one contest she had even the slightest amount of interest in right now, and there was only around a month or so left until it was upon her. At least… she was pretty sure there was around a month.

Keeping track of the time while traveling through a forest without any signs of civilization was a bit difficult. Moxie shook her head. All she could do was keep plugging along. According to the last directions she’d gotten, she wasn’t far. The next city was only a few days away.

She took a step.

Then she paused.

Her brow knit for a moment. Then she spun to the side, her hand flying up before herself. A form blurred from the forest. Sleek and coated with glossy black fur that made it nearly invisible in the darkness, it was upon her in a flash—

Moxie’s magic churned.

The monster spun past her, flipping once through the air before crashing into a tree trunk with a crunch. It dropped down without a sound. The monster had been some form of catlike creature, but now it was nothing at all. Coils of gray magic slithered up from its body. They flowed through the air to slither into Moxie’s palm. She clenched her fist around the magic and it vanished, absorbed, and it joined a sea of gray magic that lurked deep within her soul.

Another river of power flowed into her. This one was pure magical energy — the power from the now-dead monster’s soul.

“I took no pleasure in that,” Moxie told the corpse. It hadn’t been particularly powerful. A Rank 4, by her best guess. Nothing nearly worth her time… but one never knew how much strength they would need.

Father had shown her that she was nowhere near as strong as she’d hoped. And, in Obsidia, there were others as powerful as Father had been. Some were even stronger. Those at the tournament might be no different.

She couldn’t afford to be caught unprepared again.

Moxie flicked her hand. Vines twisted up from the ground, binding the corpse in a tight cocoon. The monster would feed the forest. Life would come from the death she had caused.

“Equilibrium,” Moxie said, inclining her head slightly. “Your life wasn’t wasted. It was just… spent.”

The grimoire on her back trembled.

Moxie blinked. It had been a while since Grim had done much of anything. Despite her best efforts to communicate with him recently, the book had clammed up.

“Grim?” Moxie asked. She lowered her stance, her eyes going narrow as she scanned her surroundings for a monster. “What is it? Is something wrong?”

A raspy laugh rolled out from the book’s pages.

“It’s time to march, Lover-girl. My patience has been rewarded,” Grim whispered. The shadows at Moxie’s feet darkened. “The Heralds have returned.”

“What?” Moxie asked. Something in her chest fluttered. A tiny spark of hope. One that she couldn’t afford to feed. Not yet. She couldn’t afford distractions right now. Not when her students were counting on her. Such thoughts were only useful if they were confirmed. “What are you talking about?”

“You already know, Moxie. I feel the whisper of the world — and you could too if you listened closer. But, just this once, I’ll spell it out for you,” Grim replied. Delight coiled through his voice like a snake coiling to strike. “Noah is back.”