The young Magis was granted no respite to weave his incantations. With a sudden, violent surge, the horrors conjured demonic fel, expelling sanguine balloons from their palms. Three orbs of coagulated blood arched through the air toward the mortal.
While they lacked the linear velocity of common mageia, their erratic, drifting orbit exerted a crushing psychological weight. If Seraph showed even the slightest fracture in his guard, those explosive cysts would lunge.
[Screech!]
The flute's shrill wail spiralled into a deafening crescendo. Seraph's skull throbbed with searing agony despite his regained focus, yet the apparitions of his parents remained—ghastly and unyielding.
They gripped his legs with a desperate, suffocating strength, as if conspiring with that trio of harlequin horrors to ensure their own son's slaughter.
This was the true manifestation of demonic fel. The Piperclowns were entities of mirage, architects of a phantom reality. These demonic distortions did more than merely deceive the mind; the harvest of their illusory fel reaped a tangible, warped distortion of existence itself.
The more a mortal succumbed to the allure of this fel, the more absolute their delirium and spiritual descent became. Even if they managed to shatter the veil, the residue of the hallucination festered—a permanent stain upon the subconscious, as though the lie had become a haunting, indelible truth.
Even for those who rejected the sight—those who desperately tried to tell themselves these visions were but hollow trifles—the illusory fel would still exact its toll. Seraph stood paralysed, his limbs anchored by the visceral, leaden weight of his parents' hands pinning him to the earth.
Illusory fel was a terrifyingly potent force. Many sovereigns within the Daemon Legion commanded this rank of metaphysical distortion. It was whispered that at the zenith of its power, they could transmute any figment of the imagination into absolute reality—a sovereign dominion akin to the Angelic Race, against which no resistance stands a chance.
Seraph looked down in profound lamentation. Before him, the abyss still yawned wide; his father and mother maintained their suffocating grip on his ankles. He could still feel the scorching gales of hellfire, even as he watched the three Piperclowns relentlessly hurl their explosive balloons. The spectres of his kin bled into the harlequin troupe, as if the physical realm and the world of delusion had fused into a single, nightmare vista.
The young man didn't believe a shred of the mirage, yet he remained oblivious to the tracks of salt and sorrow carving paths down his face. His limbs stayed anchored, leaden and unresponsive. Even as a lie, the agony piercing his heart was indistinguishable from the truth.
Entities of illusory fel manifest seldom upon Laurasia, yet each is a herald of true ruin. Many Demon Hunters and Magis will forsake a contract the moment they realise their quarry is a beast of mirage.
It isn't cowardice that stays their hand; for even in victory, illusory fel acts as a virulent toxin. The malevolence invariably leaves a long-term rot within the subconscious.
Seraph jerked his head up, his eyes ignited with a vengeful fury like erupting magma. The atmosphere around him buckled and warped under the intense heat. Arcs of fulmination danced across the fabric of his Mageia mantle.
"Ventus Undas!"
"Ventus Casus!!"
[Crack!]
The spells tore from his throat—less a chant and more a feral roar. His voice trembled, fractured; the sheer force of his vendetta threatened his sanity, yet that very resolve pushed his Mageia power toward a transcendent rank.
[Whirr!]
As the final syllable echoed, the air around Seraph began to coil and churn. The friction of the atmosphere birthed jagged sparks of lightning. If the mirage could dictate reality, then reality was about to exact its vengeance upon the lie.
[Slash! Rip! Shred!]
Frenzied squalls of gale-force winds shredded the illusory fel of the three Piperclowns, forcing the delusion to vanish into nothingness. The sanguine balloons detonated violently within their palms while the horrors still clutched them.
These razor-edged currents coalesced into incandescent green blades of Mageia. The raging tempest spun in tandem with the enchanted steel, sending ethereal knives whistling through the harlequin troupe.
The trio of Piperclowns sensed their encroaching doom with a preternatural instinct far swifter than any mortal. The moment the spell's resonance hit their ears, they tried to bolt. But the tumultuous winds encircling them left no room for escape.
Demonic shrieks, shrill and piercing, echoed through the amphitheatre—a final, desperate plea as they clawed at the demonic miasma to mount a resistance. It was futile. Within heartbeats, the luminous blades struck, carving the jesters into a frantic spray of viscera. The wind-born steel hacked them into a thousand jagged ribbons of meat.
[Squeltch! Splatter!]
A rain of dull, bile-green gore and tattered flesh flung across the grandstands, painting the arena in a grotesque mural of slaughter. The stench of a dying demon is no mere musk; as their carcasses were flayed into carrion, a cloying, putrid rot choked the air.
Yet, even as the harlequin troupe was utterly unmade by the Mageia gale, Seraph didn't offer a hint of triumph. He remained hollow, his expression a mask of stone. He didn't even deign to acknowledge the motes of essence that drifted toward him like carrion flies to a corpse.
The howling whirlwind beneath the great pavilion gradually bled its momentum. Before long, every particle fell still, leaving only a thick, suffocating shroud of dust and a gloom that refused to lift from the soul.
Seraph ground his teeth, his knuckles white as he gathered the resolve to look down once more. There, in the dim light, the earth had reclaimed its form. The floor was but a flat, unremarkable surface. No abyss yawned; no demonic fel licked at his heels. The chamber had plunged into the absolute silence of a sepulchre, devoid of the wailing spirits that had, moments ago, tried to drag him into the dark.
"Mum… Dad…" Seraph whispered to the void, his voice a cracked rasp.
His fingers clawed at his chest, digging into the fabric as if to reach the organ beneath. His heart was a ruin of agony. Though the skirmish had left his flesh nearly unmarred—save for the stray shards of energy that had bitten through his Mageia circle—the internal lacerations felt as though a serrated blade had been dragged through his very soul.
The trauma inflicted by illusory fel is no trifle to be mended by poultice or prayer. While those of tempered iron will can cast off the lingering rot, a wound to the spirit remains far more insidious than any splintered bone or gash in the hide. Physical agony can be shuttered away, but once the venom of illusory fel seeps into the lightless depths of the psyche, the damage festers, blooming into a persistent, incurable ache.
Though the slaughter had reached its grisly conclusion, Seraph's pulse hammered against his ribs like a panicked bird in a cage. His hands kept shaking with a violent tremor; the frantic pleas of his parents continued to grate against his eardrums. He knew it for what it was—a phantom echo of the demonic curse—yet the logic of the mind couldn't silence the visceral horror of the nerves.
The young Magis raised two shaking fingers to the centre of his brow, forcing a final incantation through gritted teeth.
"Flamus Catharis," he hissed, his voice quivering with the weight of his resolve.
[Flick!]
In an instant, a pallid, white flame ignited at his fingertips. His digits served as the match, yet the fire that blossomed was not born of destruction. It was a hue of pure, spectral milk, possessing a fluid grace while lacking any predatory heat.
The small ember drifted from his touch, and suddenly, Seraph's forehead and skull were engulfed. The white flame coiled around his head, hungry and methodical. Beneath that ivory blaze, his silver locks shimmered, catching stray arcs of fulmination in a dance of celestial light.