[A Memory Within a Memory – Year 0 of the Divinity War; Throm’tor’s World, Throne Room]

  Painfully, Moraithe landed at the foot of the throne. Then gratitude welled up to protect and heal him.

  Throm’tor suddenly lashed out with his scathe lash just as Norgoth found himself unprotected. In shock and surprise, Norgoth threw out a lash of power from the throne. Wielding it fitfully, desperately.

  Throm’tor countered the power calmly and deftly. Then unexpectedly their lashes locked, tangling themselves together. Both reared back, jerking at their powers. But Norgoth, though unskilled, had the power of the throne, with a wrenching tug he rooted the scathe lash from Throm’tor’s very soul, scarring his mind in a way that could never be repaired or healed.

  Throm’tor screamed with inhuman pain. Such a soul wound was permanent, he would never be able to control another soul with the scathe lash, not even in death. But he was still more powerful and dangerous than anyone cared to imagine.

  As Throm’tor twisted about in pain, Moraithe’s terror released him. And with all the strength he could muster, he groaned to his knees and clawed his way back into the throne.

  There was no longer any need to shield them from his scathe lash now that it had been rooted out. As Throm’tor recovered from his loss, Moraithe gripped him in the power of the throne. He would feel all of what he had done. He would suffer the full weight of justice.

  Moraithe forced him to turn his own fear and hate upon himself. His glyph flared once more. Throm'tor writhed and contorted, shrieking like death itself, and as he trembled in pain, the earth began to shake as if it shared his pain. Finally, the storm ceased. Trembling, he crawled back to his knees, tears streaming down his rage-stricken face.

  Then, startlingly, his mask of fury split into a wicked smile. “Yes. Feel the power, the absolute power. Control me, make me your slave, your puppet.” He spat blood at their feet as he paused. “Already you are beginning to feel the power consume you. Yield to it, let it fill you with lust for more. Join me and we shall rule all. We shall make thrones and take all souls that all shall bow to us forever!” he roared in exultation.

  In sickened disgust, Moraithe pushed away the power, unable to bear such a thought. “You seek to make us as yourself, you maggot. You cannot worm your way into our hearts this time.”

  Throm’tor grimaced in anger. The spot of blood he’d spit on the floor bulged and shivered, swelling and crackling until it formed into a great beast with many rows of sharp teeth. The beast roared and lunged to attack them. Together Moraithe and Norgoth reached out for its will only to find that it had no will at all. Throm’tor, it was controlled by Throm’tor. As the jaws closed about Norgoth, Moraithe snatched Throm’tor’s mind, stopping the beast.

  Then he turned the beast back upon its master. Let Throm'tor feel those teeth tear into him, let him feel the sting of justice.

  But as the beast turned, Norgoth snatched his arm urgently. “No, wait.” The beast paused. Releasing his arm, Norgoth turned to Throm'tor. “What is this beast?”

  Throm’tor remained silent.

  “What is it!” Norgoth roared as he gripped the throne about him and forced the truth from his lips.

  “It is a shield. Once it consumes me even you could not reach my mind to control it. Surely you did not think me fool enough not to learn to protect myself from my own power?”

  “Enough! Destroy it,” Norgoth commanded.

  Like vapors of mist, the beast evaporated and blew away.

  Throm'tor cared for nothing but himself. He would only continue scheming until he saw all people suffer with every pain he could inflict forever. Who knew what cunning device Throm’tor would employ to regain the throne next? His scarred mind could still use the throne even if his scathe lash was gone forever. He had too many tricks, and they had nearly fallen already. Every moment they faced him they risked it all. He had to be destroyed, though he knew the sacrifice it would require and his heart strained at the weight of it.

  Just then, Saffrael burst into the room, he would recognize her stardust freckles anywhere. Their eyes locked, speaking volumes. Her soft lips parted to speak.

  Throm’tor lashed out at her with a bolt so bright that it tore into Saffrael’s heart, bursting her chest, gushing sizzling blood before she toppled into a lifeless heap.

  Moraithe’s heart screamed within him, a tortured, shrieking agony. His chest seemed to burst in time with hers, a throbbing of unbearable pain deep within the blistering char that was his broken heart. With all his strength, he clung to the throne to keep himself from falling to the earth and writhing along with the bystanders who’d been caught in the blast.

  With burning tears streaming down his face, he locked the power so tightly upon Throm’tor that he could neither move, nor breathe, nor even think without Moraithe allowing it. Then he prepared himself to give the command that would be his last.

  Smearing the tears across his cheeks, he looked around himself into the faces of those he had just saved, silently dooming them. They were his friends, his brothers and sisters. There was no way they could know the weight he felt. The burden of all their souls. The crushing weight of the decision overwhelmed him to the point of dragging him under. This was bigger than his life. It was more than all of their lives. But how could he bear to witness their deaths after Saffrael? How could he stand to slay them, even to save them?

  He could feel Norgoth beside him, his thoughts, his pain, as deep as his own. They knew that Throm’tor must never get a hold of that power, no one must.

  One thought was all that kept him from slipping away in the pain of it all. One promise was all that could redeem him. I swear I will repay your deaths. Perhaps the thought had come from Norgoth, though he could not be certain with their minds linked so tightly as they were. He spoke the words softly, a whisper in the minds of all who cared to listen. I will see you reborn. I will see you to glory. I will guard you from tyranny forever more, I swear it!

  Then with a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes, he knew what he must do. Pushing past the lump he forced the words out, and together they gave the command that would doom them all.

  Their anguished voices rose as one. “Throm’tor, we mete justice upon you this day. Break the glyph and yield it to us.”

  He snarled and gnashed his teeth in response to the command.

  Moraithe’s will tightened around him like an iron vise. He had bound so many before, crushed their thoughts, reshaped their very identities… and now it was happening to him.

  “No,” he snarled, struggling against the force pressing him to his knees. “I am the master here! I—”

  His body obeyed a will that was not his own. Moraithe forced him to reach for the glyph, to rip it from his own flesh, to destroy himself. A fate he had inflicted on countless others.

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  As his fingers moved against his own will, his laughter turned to a rasping breath of disbelief. “So … this is what it feels like …”

  Fighting every motion his claws flared from his fingertips, and he tore into his right hand digging out the glyph. Rending bloodless flesh, his hand was shredded into a mess of pale filleted gore. He tore deeply with the snapping of hollow veins, ligament, and sinew, baring bones, splintering them, and tearing them away at the joints to get to the glyph—red with an incandescent glow like blazing iron from the forge. With harsh curses, he tore the glyph free.

  “Break it,” they commanded as one.

  Disregarding his useless carnage of a hand Throm’tor clenched the glyph in his snarling teeth, and prying with his good hand snapped it in half.

  As the glyph cracked, Throm’tor’s sneer faltered. His fingers trembled, clutching at the broken fragments as if he could piece them back together.

  “No… I control this world! I built it!” His voice, once thundering with power, cracked into something small—something almost human.

  But the laws of reality no longer bent for him. The ground beneath him swallowed his words, and as his body dissolved into nothing, his final, ragged whisper carried on the wind.

  “Nothing can stop me…” And he was utterly destroyed, body and soul.

  Suddenly the earth reeled and shook in a violent wave of stone and earth, heaving as in the throes of death, tossing them all like sailors in a storm. They braced themselves against the quake, though many stumbled to the floor. Golden platters rolled and clattered. Some of those nearby slipped upon the food spattered and smeared upon the floor, falling splayed out upon the stone.

  With the last of their strength, Moraithe and Norgoth turned the throne upon itself and tore it asunder. Thousands of raving souls screamed forth, blazing with a rage that burnt them to the bone, incinerating their flesh with an anger this world had never before known. A rage even Elithir would scarcely have stood against.

  The earth shuddered more violently, rolling in waves, stone heaved and splintered, the world over. The temple trembled, but its walls held strong. Across the sweeping landscape, writhing bodies tumbled through the air howling in pain as shafts of splintering stone burst through the ground and tossed them like worn-out polishing rags.

  The temple lurched to the side. With charred limbs, Moraithe tumbled from the broken throne, flailing for purchase on something, anything. His hand caught Norgoth’s robes. Norgoth shouted as his arm slipped from the sleeve and he gripped the throne, wrapping the stone form of the enchantress about the waist, with his other arm he reached for Moraithe. But a body tumbled past knocking Moraithe away.

  He slid into the throng of flailing bodies. A cloud of severed souls from the throne surged toward him, blazing with a rage that blackened his flesh, curling his limbs into uselessness.

  The dead and dying littered the temple floor. The severed souls snatched upon those bodies, fueling and animating them with their anger.

  Lesions blanched from his skin and his blood streaked the stone as he struggled for purchase on the ever-shifting scape. He slid past a limp and mangled form covered in stardust freckles and he grasped Saffrael’s body with all of his strength.

  With a tremendous blast, the world cracked and shattered, laying bare the incandescent glow of molten earth-blood between the fissures.

  The living dead swarmed him with their anger. Blasting and clawing in marrow-deep lesions, bursting his skin. A cacophony of tortured screams rent the now hazy air, as molten rock blazed across the land. It was the last gasp of the world, spewing the last of its glowing, red lifeblood in a final blinding flash.

  Moraithe gasped as he recalled his death. His breath hitched as his vision swam, the blinding chaos of memory giving way to the dim, shifting light of the present. His hands trembled, still feeling the phantom weight of Saffrael’s lifeless body in his arms. The ground beneath him was level—but for a moment, he had been falling.

  He exhaled shakily, forcing his hands to unclench. “That … that was real.”

  Elithir’s voice cut through the haze. “You remember now.”

  “All those souls Throm’tor had trapped were unleashed.”

  Elithir nodded. “After eons of enslavement and torture. They seek only to inflict on men what they have suffered.”

  “And so the war began.” He looked up at Elithir. “That’s why I have to stop the Severed. I released them. It’s my fault. So I’ll become strong enough to stop them.” He struggled to hold back tears. “But I am so weak. I nearly died, but gratitude healed me, and I found Norgoth and Saffrael’s bodies and healed them with it.”

  Elithir patted his back, gently. “There is no growth without resistance.”

  “You said that before.”

  “And it’s as true now as ever.” He lifted a hand toward Moraithe as if feeling the heat coming off of him. “Would you care to know?”

  “What?”

  “Your self-assurance has risen considerably. You measured fourteen before. Now it is seven thousand four hundred and thirty-two. You blew right past soldier and captain ranks and now measure well into the rank of master.”

  Moraithe turned to Elithir, stunned. “Where can I get more of those memories to cultivate?”

  “I suspect fragments of them were scattered here upon the ruin of Throm’tor’s world.”

  Moraithe looked across the tumultuous land. “Yet even with your power, you can’t find them?”

  “They are your memories. They do not resonate with me. But if you train here, perhaps you will stumble across some fragments.”

  The land shuddered again, the earth beneath them groaning as if to prove a point. Moraithe stood tall, trembling but resolute, the weight of Elithir’s words grounding him. “I will find a way. This is my war to end. I’ll get strong enough to shatter them all, as I shattered Throm’tor.”

  “A bold dream. But will you have time?” The land beneath their feet began to sputter, but Elithir brushed it aside with a wave of his hand. “While you grow they are enacting their own plans, some of which could spell the end of all you or I know. Some could even set us all back to little more than we were in the beginning, minds who know of nothing but ourselves.”

  “If I gave you all my gratitude you could stand against them. You could break them.”

  “My path takes me another way. We all get to choose. Else what is the purpose of our core selves, our minds?”

  “Then what is your plan?”

  Elithir laughed. “Oh, how refreshing. I have told no one yet, but I intend to entangle myself across all time, unto the end of eternity.”

  “And you call me bold.”

  Elithir chuckled. “It would be nice to see your progress in action. Why don’t you show us the power of your entanglements now.”

  Moraithe nocked an arrow. But as he did he realized that the runic key he’d entangled to a bolder had now expanded far beyond the bolder, to encompass a considerable swath of land. He drew the bow and fired. His timing with the entanglement was perfect. The arrow blasted into the side of a nearby mountain causing it to topple and spew forth a spout of lava.

  “Woah! Did you see that?” Moraithe gave a mystic grin.

  Elithir only chortled and clapped him on the back.