Chapter 21 – Holy Vow

Chapter 21 – Holy Vow

Seris bit down on her pain and glared.

Whatever the ugly skeleton was doing to her really really hurt. Every pulse of it made her vision swim. But that was okay, Seris was used to pain.

Big Sis was watching over her in the real world. Seris had no doubt at all that Big Sis would win, because Big Sis was a Goddess and Goddesses won. So if there was a battle Seris needed to worry about, it was this one.

Even so, something had changed.

The ugly skeleton’s form in the dreamscape was still translucent and wavering, like a ghost trying very hard to pretend it belonged in the world. But its presence felt much heavier now. Meaner. The pressure of it sat on the Ashen Wastes like a storm cloud pressing down on the world.

And worst of all, the coin inside Seris’s chest had stopped moving completely.

She could still feel it lodged in the center of her being, like a door that should have opened but refused to budge. No matter how hard she willed it to turn, it stayed frozen in place, and every attempt only sent fresh pain spearing through her chest, bright enough to make tears spring to her eyes. Even though there was just a tiny little bit more to go.

Seris swallowed hard and blinked furiously.

A Saintess of Light should not cry before her enemy. It did not matter how much it hurt. It did not matter how frustrating and unfair it was. Crying where the ugly skeleton could see would feel like losing, and Seris absolutely refused to lose to that thing.

A renewed sense of injustice swelled inside her. What was that ugly skeleton’s problem? Why could it not just let her be happy? What had she ever done to it?

“Let there be light,” Seris said, voice tight with pain and fury.

A great beam of golden-white radiance split the gray heavens and crashed toward Vhal with enough force to melt mountains. But unlike before, the ugly skeleton’s barrier swallowed it without even a ripple. The holy light vanished into the congealed darkness as though the attack had never existed at all.

Seris stared.

Then she pointed at it with as much saintly dignity as she could manage, and a thousand swords of light screamed down from the sky.

They struck Vhal’s barrier in a storm of radiant blades, bright enough to turn the Ashen Wastes gold for an instant. Sparks burst outward. Light hissed and scattered. The barrier did not even crack.

The ugly skeleton was no longer looking at her. It sat on a newly summoned throne of black bone and warped iron, jaw clenched so tightly she could hear the faint grind of teeth even from this distance. Its empty eye sockets burned with unstable green fire, but its attention was completely elsewhere.

Seris’s lips pressed into a thin line.

That was understandable, she supposed.

Whatever Vhal was doing to her in the real world had to be difficult. If it was affecting her real body, then Big Sis was definitely fighting it right now, and if Big Sis was fighting it, then of course it could not spare much attention for Seris.

That was understandable. That was fair.

Big Sis was amazing, and if Seris were in the ugly skeleton’s place, she would probably be concentrating very hard too.

Seris was still mad anyway.

She was the Saintess of Light. Ugly skeletons and monsters and every horrible thing in the world were supposed to tremble before her.

A bolt of green lightning split the air with a shriek, and Seris yelped as she flung herself sideways with a frantic beat of her wings. The lightning scorched past her shoulder so closely that the heat prickled across her skin. More spells followed immediately after. Lances of deathly fire. Spears of black ice. Green comets that howled as they tore through the sky.

Then came the arrows.

Seris clasped her hands in prayer, and the Ashen Wastes split in half beneath a towering golden barrier that sprang from the earth and rose into the heavens. The first volley shattered against it in bursts of dark magic and splintered bone, but Seris felt the difference immediately.

These attacks were too strong. Where spells and arrows struck, cracks spiderwebbed across her barrier’s golden surface, and they did not heal.

Seris’s breath caught. Below her, the dead were rising.

Skeletal hands burst from the ash-black earth in every direction. Fingers clawed and scraped and dug into cracked stone as corpse after corpse dragged itself upward into the world. Some wore rusted armor. Some still had scraps of rotted banners tangled around their bones. Others were little more than blackened skeletons wrapped in strips of grave-cloth, their jaws hanging open in silent screams.

Each one that emerged lifted a weapon. Each one turned toward her. Each one attacked.

Farther out, the skeletons of long-dead giants heaved themselves upright from the wasteland, their towering frames shedding dust and ash in great gray clouds. Their hollow eye sockets blazed green as they looked down at her from impossible heights. Above them, the sky darkened under the spread of vast, rotting wings.

Dragons.

Or what had once been dragons.

Their flesh hung in strips from exposed bone. Their ribcages glowed from within with sickly green fire. When they opened their jaws, smoke and corpse-light spilled out.

Seris’s throat tightened.

The army of darkness stretched all the way to the horizon.

At the front stood armored figures that looked just like the mean death knight who had once bullied her, except there were dozens of them now. No, hundreds. Their swords burned with black aura, and every one of them radiated the same cruel, oppressive menace. Above them drifted liches in torn robes and ornate crowns, their staffs crackling with unholy power.

They were only a little less ugly than the ugly skeleton itself.

Seris suppressed a hiccup.

This was too scary. And unfair. That ugly skeleton was cheating!

Well, Seris could cheat too. She had Big Sister, and one Big Sister was much better than all of those scary undead put together. The ugly skeleton had cheated first, so if Seris cheated too then it absolutely was not her fault.

She shut her eyes for one desperate second and pictured Big Sister standing beside her.

Perfect. Immaculate. Serene and gentle and beautiful beyond words.

Big Sis would place a hand on her shoulder and smile that warm, reassuring smile of hers and say: Everything will be alright, Seris.

Seris reached for that image with all her heart. A shape formed beside her.

Soft light gathered into the outline of a woman. A vague silhouette. Gentle warmth. Pale gold. Familiar in the way sunlight was familiar, or the feeling of being wrapped in blankets while someone stroked your hair.

But it was faint, thin, and incomplete. Less than a shadow.

Seris opened her eyes and stared at it in dismay.

“No,” she said. “That’s wrong.”

The pale figure flickered uncertainly beside her.

“No, no, no, Big Sis is much prettier than that!”

She reached for the image harder, trying to remember every detail. The exact curve of Big Sis’s smile. The way her eyes softened when she looked at Seris. The warmth of her lap.

The silhouette trembled. Then the army attacked, and Seris had no more time to figure it out.

Her barrier shattered. It broke with a sound like crystal splitting under a hammer, and the sky beyond it erupted into chaos.

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“Ah!”

Seris threw herself backward as black magic tore through the space where she had been hovering a heartbeat before. A death knight came flying at her with impossible speed, black aura exploding from its blade as it swung for her neck. Seris jerked upward, barely avoiding decapitation, only for a dragon’s breath to roar across the sky from above.

Green fire washed over her.

She screamed. Pain flared across her side. The smell of burning cloth and singed hair hit her a second later, and Seris nearly lost control of her flight before instinctively flinging up another barrier.

That barrier lasted perhaps three seconds, then a lich’s spell punched through it and sent cracks racing across the surface.

Seris fled.

There was no better word for it.

She dodged. She cast barriers. She dodged again. She twisted and rolled through the air while arrows hissed past her cheeks and sword aura carved glowing wounds through the sky. Every time she managed to gather enough focus to attack, it accomplished almost nothing.

She hurled a thousand swords of light.

They bounced off the death knights’ armor.

She called down heavenly judgment.

Entire swathes of skeletal soldiers vanished in holy fire, reduced to ash and molten slag. But even as they burned, more hands clawed up from beneath the earth. More skeletons rose. More dead things dragged themselves upright and took their places.

There was no end to them. There was only pain and noise and the relentless certainty that if she slowed down for even a moment, they would tear her apart.

And through all of it, the ugly skeleton sat on its throne. It never looked at her.