DISCLAIMER:
Readers discretion is advised.
This chapter contains themes of insanity, mentions of self harm, and suicide.
If you are uncomfortable with these topics, skip to the line:
" *Woooooom* With a violent shift in what felt like ambient mana "
Please Enjoy.
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Music for today:
Elephant Music - Pressured
https://youtu.be/zRCO6KRFvhw
Chapter 503
Mid Afternoon - Late Summer : Year 39 : Poseidon, Draconic Continent
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- Hera ~
*Crack* The moment I came to, the snap of a bone fracturing ripped through my skeleton while a warm, metallic liquid soaked through my mouth.
As if I had been petrified into stone, my body was so rigid it was like my muscles had been crystallized. Each movement shredded muscle, and with the immense volume of mana soaking my flesh, it felt like I was being boiled alive.
It hurt worse than anything I had ever felt... A sensation so overwhelming it was indescribable...
But the moment my mind started catching up.. feeling the texture of fractured scales on my tongue as I recognized the warm liquid dripping from my maw.. my voice eluded me. -B..Blood..?-
And the world froze...
-Va..silias..?- By the time I opened my eyes, my claws were sunk so deep into his flesh they were touching bone—my maw so tightly clamped around his neck that I could feel his spine with my teeth. -W..What..?-
I.. didn't know how to react...
Feeling my body not responding as if I had been paralyzed, I gripped my limbs with my mana forcefully to loosen my grip, open my maw, and hobble backward.. praying to be met with Vasilias's eyes...
But as blood poured from his neck, soaking his scales and flowing down the caverns entryway like a crimson river, his eyes were.. empty...
And so was his body...
*C..rackle* Watching him suddenly collapse with a lifeless slump.. everything froze...
The noise it made.. the ground-shattering slam mixed with the splash from the pool of his own blood just.. made my mind break.
-V..VASILIAS?!- Darting to his side, forcing my body to move with the grip of mana, I forced my aura into his body hoping.. praying for it to resist me, but...
It moved aside for me...
His body was alive. Even then, alien tendrils of flesh were moving to try and heal where his flesh had been gorged.
But.. his aura was loose and lifeless—his mana no longer moving and shifting with the rhythm I always knew it to.
His body was alive, but his soul.. was absent...
-W...- "~WHAT DID I DO?!~" Screaming with a burst of divinity I had never known to own, I tried to pull my senses back—to move my consciousness back to my soul, and detach myself from the grip of flesh, but it only made that dreadful vision replay itself...
That horrible recollection of my own regret. "~Pray as hard as you can that he brings you to a future I cannot see...~"
"~DELPHI!~" My roar escaped with a planet-quaking rumble—the cavern rattling as my divinity churned with a suicidal burn. "~WHAT DID YOU DO?!~"
For that breath, every god on the planet froze... The divinity I had spun was beyond anything I had ever known, in a league I didn't belong.
But in that moment, I didn't ask where it came from...
I simply used it... "~WHERE ARE YOU?!~" Snapping my eyes around, I found my vision slowly twisting into what I knew from my soul form—walls no longer obstructing my vision as my gaze started piercing through the material world.
Until finally.. I saw it...
Hovering over Vasilias's body, I saw a cloud.. a soul.. staring not at me, but down through the ground...
Down at the source of the 'call'...
-Delphi...- It made my body numb with rage. With every movement, the vision replayed itself as if to torture me—regret tearing through me more with every breath as rage tried to eclipse it. -I'll fucking kill you.-
But as guilt and rage tore my mind apart.. something else shifted in my soul...
-H..Huh..?- Deep beneath my subconscious, I felt.. pity...
As if there was a third voice in my mind—something beneath the dragoness, and the goddess—I felt a fragment of my mind scoff.
-Delphi... What did you do to me?- *Snap* Clenching my jaw so tight my teeth cracked, I gripped my body with a force capable of blending it—as if threatening to destroy it if it meant I could reach her.
But that voice never spoke... It was too distant.. too buried...
Too confident I couldn't reach it.
And that was the moment my sanity snapped...
-You dare...- I was going to dig it out even if it'd cost my mind and body.. to claw through my scales, my reserve, and my soul.
But the moment my mind started making that spiral, something else grabbed me... Like the fabric of space itself was denying the action.
*Woooooom* With a violent shift in what felt like ambient mana, it was like reality folded in on itself. My mind halted, rage vanished, and inner turmoil ceased...
The two Hera's in my mind that had joined hands to try and find and tear apart that deeper voice.. both simply froze.
It was fear.
In that moment, terror unlike anything I had ever known tore through me...
*Cr-r-r-r-raaaack* Hearing snaps like space itself was tearing, my eyes fell to find mana flooding into Vasilias like an ocean were draining into him—his gaping wounds healing with a grotesque, inorganic efficiency as bones mended, fibrous flesh spread, and shattered scales melted back together.
His presence was back.. but the gentle warmth I had always known him to radiate was absent...
In that moment, I felt a chill unlike anything I had ever experienced... A bloodlust even Delphi, herself, couldn't replicate...
Watching him stand with an undead twist, his neck straightened to lay his eyes in mine.. to dig that heartless gaze through me before... *Crack*
Feeling a chill rip through my chest.. I looked down to see his paw sunk beneath my scales—his claws punched through my ribs, carved through my muscle, and touching my reserve—gently holding it like a marble.
That feeling.. that pause.. was inevitability...
-H..Huh..?- He.. was going to kill me... "~W..Why..?~" My voice escaped like a pitiful whimper.
But he wasn't listening...
His eyes never left mine.. but his focus was never there to begin with...
He was looking, no.. searching for something beneath my consciousness.. beneath the turbulence of the voices clashing in my subconscious...
He wasn't looking at 'me', he was looking at that foreign fragment my soul was rejecting—that 'echo' of Delphi that had implanted itself in me.
Every part of me rejected it completely...
Its expulsion was the only thing my clashing consciousnesses could agree on.
But he didn't care how 'we' felt...
*wooooOOOOM* Suddenly focusing the oceanic flow of mana draining into him through his paw, and through my chest, the turbulence in my reserve.. in my mind, and in my soul.. was eclipsed by an unstoppable current...
...Like ripples in a pond being obliterated by a tsunami.
Resistance wasn't an option.. it was too futile to even entertain...
All I could do was watch as those voices and fragments I fought to keep separated—the dragoness, the goddess, and Delphi's echo—were all irresistibly blended together, and like an incredible wind rolling across a desert.. settled sands were being forced to move.
Succumbing to the unfathomable flow of mana, my mind removed itself from my physical body.. from the pain and the anger.. to be shown more of what had always been present, just buried...
Glimmers of memories from my life as a goddess blended with recollections of paralleled arrogance, regret, and shame from my life as a dragon.
No matter how much the voices fought, they were one in the same.. only separated by arrogance and denial.
In that darkness.. in that silence.. I had memories thought lost to time reveal themselves—not belonging to just the dragoness or the goddess.. but both as one.
To resist was a futile effort.. like a fish that only ever knew a pond fighting the ocean's strongest current, I could only move as it dictated—to remember.. recall.. and let that foreign fragment planted in my chest blend with it all...
*Woom* The moment I let it.. an unimaginable warmth spread through me...
Love.. trust.. and a hopeless faith...
Prayer.. familiarity.. and a burst of understanding akin to epiphany...
That was the moment it finally clicked...
"~Hera...~" The next time that memory of mine replayed... "~Pray...~" Delphi's voice reached me not merely sounding akin to my own... "~Pray as hard as you can that he brings you to a future I cannot see...~" But being it...
That was me.
I was Hera, yes.. but in the end, Hera had always just been a fragment of something else...
Just like that echo that lodged itself in my soul.. I was merely a single piece of a larger whole...
I had simply been blind to it all along.
*Woom* Feeling the current begin to finally still.. my senses started returning... I felt the natural ebbs and flows of mana—the characteristic ripples of my presence—and like a fog I had never known life without was lifting, I was waking up.
I felt like a new being, but I was merely made aware of what I was all along—a fragment abandoned—no.. hidden away.. and given to another.
-Va..silias...- The moment my mind muttered that name, it rang through my being like a gong through a valley—a wave of warmth blanketing the discomfort, anxiety, and worry that welled with every thought and recollection.
Until a fragment of clarity finally settled...
I was a tool meant for my greater whole.. a device meant to grant a voice to a being that couldn't speak.. to grant sight to a being that couldn't look...
And I had misunderstood that purpose...
The wish Delphi created me to fulfill wasn't to save those who walked her surface.. the ones I ignorantly believed to be 'her children'.. but to protect the children she was yet to have—the children that could only exist if fate was perfectly threaded for her to survive the 'thing' that threatened her existence itself...
...The 'thing' that fate favored like its king...
The 'thing' that doomed every future my greater self had seen...
The...
"~Hera...~"
Suddenly snapping awake to a voice I could never forget.. I found myself floating.. staring up at a ceiling decorated with greenery, dancing with the rhythm of bioluminescent caustics... -H..Huh...-
"~Are you.. awake..?~"
Hearing the endless worry in that muffled voice, I moved—lifting my paw to try and sit up, only to rapidly plunge beneath the surface before my eyes could reach the shore...
I.. was in the burial aquifer.. and the moment I noticed, I panicked. "Uh-AAHHH!"
Letting out a scream from the depths of my chest, poison disguised as water plunged down my throat, filling my stomach and lungs before, in a survival-driven jolt, I twisted, and flapped. *KWAKOOOOOM*
It was like a bomb had gone off in the center of the aquifer—water erupting over the lip of the shore and showering everything in the vicinity with a tidal wave of poison before I flapped again.. and again.. and again.
But I wasn't moving.. and I was panicking. Like I was being dragged into the depths by Delphi herself, it took everything I had merely to stay near the surface.. before...
*WOOOOM* Piercing the shallows, a set of bleached paws gripped my horns, and threw me. *FWOOO-CRRRRRREAAAAA—*
The screech of scraping metal ripped through the cavern as I skidded across the shore, using every drop of strength I had just to remain standing before looking up to see Vasilias staring at me with a pleading look, standing in the aquifer's shallows as a bleached white infection dissolved his body. "He..ra..?"
"V-VASILIAS!" My voice boomed, and my body darted to him out of instinct—thrusting my aura forth and effortlessly blowing away the water and mana that was eating him alive.
But that was when I finally noticed it... When I finally saw it...
The wing that I extended over him didn't look like my own.. the deep, ocean-blue membrane I always knew to wear was missing, appearing buried in bright blue, almost white fur or feathers...
But.. in reality, it wasn't either...
My body had been decorated with crystallized mana, ebbing and flowing like fur in a breeze.
And unlike the poison it should have been, it bent to my will as if I owned it...
However, even with that unimaginable power seemingly coating my scales.. it was all meaningless before him...
"Do you remember who you are..?" Before his voice... "Hera..?"
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