Chapter 1585 (1/2)

Jelick Youmun stood under the observation tower and stared anxiously upward. His skin was moist with sweat. For whatever reason, the rhythm of his day was off today. He had arrived early for his shift, with the sun still hanging low in the sky. It would probably take another hour for night to come. The guard crossed his arms and uncrossed them, over and over, wishing time to move forward.

Why had he come early?

The air in this deserted part of the Fifth Cohort was hot; uncomfortably so. Jelick began continuously wipe away sweat as he waited, exposed to the elements in his position below the observation tower. In order to placate his fluttering worries, he settled back on the familiar activity of counting his own heartbeat. His eyes practically glazed over as the sun fell toward the horizon.

Nothing was as important as restoring his rituals.

At the proper time, Jelick roused himself he raised his head and watched as the entrance to the observation tower swung open. The familiar form of his fellow guard that formed the other half of this watchtower tandem stood in the doorway.

It was the same guard with the same lined face. The familiarity was reassuring. Jelick licked his lips. “Anything to report?”

There were a few beats of silence. The other guard hesitated, his face twisting in indecision. Jelick felt like the bottom fell out of his stomach. His sweaty hands turned instantly clammy.

“...technically nothing…” The other guard shook his head. “But… I have a bad feeling. The monitoring equipment has been getting some strange readings. Keep an eye on it.”

Jelick Youmun’s feet were frozen to the ground as the other guard hurried away from the post. All of Jelick’s own stress was compounded by this additional news from his partner. His own horrible sense of impending disaster was triumphant in his chest. It clamored for Jelick’s attention, but he ignored it as best he could. The guard stiffly climbed up into the observational tower and looked at the monitoring equipment; as his fellow had suggested, the needles occasionally twitched for no discernible reason.

Jelick looked up at the wide-open sky in front of him. The last light of this planet’s sun was sinking below the horizon, allowing a complex network of stars to creep across the sky like deadly mold. A small, yellow moon hung close to the horizon straight ahead. As Jelick tried very much to calm himself, his eyes settled on that moon.

It was a slightly unfamiliar sight, which was one more shock to his already overloaded system, but the innocuous celestial body became a resting place. His heart could beat, he could stare at the moon, he could recover his equilibrium.

Perhaps the strange readings from the monitoring equipment were simply a malfunction. Those stuck up individual from the Engraving Guild might act superior, but they were just as prone to failure as the rest of them. If nothing occurred during this shift, Jelick resolved himself to complain to management that the equipment was faulty.

Now, he just needed-

Jelick paused. His eyes were still on the moon, but there was something… different about the whole of what he saw. He stared at the distant sphere with a frown on his face. Was it a change in the color…? But no, it’s pale yellow was still the same.

Jelick shook his head decisively. Perhaps the moon was just moving closer or farther away from the horizon, due to his planet’s rotation. It was strange that he had never noticed this moon in the past, but Jelick was already too frazzled to let something small like that faze him now. He settled into a comfortable position and began to count his heartbeats.

He was determined to move past this day.

One…

Two…

Three…

It only took ten heartbeats for the moon to once again seize Jelick’s attention. Suddenly, he understood the strange impression that the moon was giving him; the current moon was noticeably bigger. It was once a small coin in the sky, but now it was around double that size.

Jelick coughed lightly. Perhaps… perhaps this was also due to the rotation-

In a flash, the moon was as big as an apple, hanging above the observation tower with almost antagonistic realism. Jelick’s heartbeat counting tumbled to a stop.

Five seconds later, there was another shift and the yellow moon had doubled again in size. From yellow, it shifted toward a radiant golden as the quality of light that it was reflecting down on Jelick’s planet changed. The air seemed to glitter, despite the fact that it should be night.

Then it surged closer and took up a third of the horizon, making the light it released was almost blinding. Jelick was trembling in his seat. His body was slick with sweat.

The next jump quenched the light entirely. The observation tower was suddenly entirely in shadow. The entire sky was filled with the looming moon. With such a short distance between the two celestial bodies, the moon above was dark and ominous, hanging over Jelick Youmun like a guillotine.

From that dark landscape in the heavens, the seething hordes of Nether Beasts began to descend. It was only when the alarms from other observation towers began to ring that Jelick Youmun remembered to trigger his own.

*****

The shade worked tirelessly, first reinforcing the pillar with the memories that it had gathered, then by beginning the process of Engraving. Each motion contained within it the full weight of the shade’s Nether. This core room of the floating island began to hum with the surging energies of connection and memory.

For good measure, the shade grew several extra arms. Then it began to Engrave all three base patterns all at once.

For the Yggdrasil carving, stability and growth to compensate for a childhood of loss and instability. From the Grim Chimera, a deep-seated craving to change in a manner that would make the complex social interactions of a modern world a little easier on a misunderstood young man. And the Stillborn Phoenix eternalized that sense of helplessness an individual experiences before the unrelenting might of reality. The shade’s third image was the accumulation of compromises, spread across an increasingly dangerous life.

Each Engraving took up about a third of the pillar. They glowed with obsidian energy, the ambient waves of significance that they released lapping up against one another in complex patterns. Then came the difficult part; the shade began to layer all three Engravings across into each other’s territory.