Malcolm Tent
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Wish upon the Stars chapter 1081
🕑 Added 2026-02-11 22:45:08 +0000 UTCKane escorted me over to the table where Deanna lay, gesturing for me to stand opposite him as he took up a position on one side of her. I glanced down at my friend, noting the serene expression on her face with relief. It seemed that whatever Kane was doing wasn’t painful at least.
Honestly, I didn’t know Deanna that well. She was our guide to get here, and she’d helped me out back at Mourne Kayze, but I was smart enough to realize there was a bit of transference going on here. I was used to traveling with my friends, taking care of my own as best I could no matter what was a reflex for me these days. I could have taken a step back, accepted reality and just left her here or something…but I didn’t WANT to do that.
Deanna was one of my people. Maybe a recent one, maybe a temporary one, but that didn’t matter. I was the Wishmaster, damn it, and I was already responsible for the lives and happiness of a massive intergalactic clan. If I couldn’t even safeguard the friends who were actually WITH me, then what business did I have trying to run a faction?
Beyond that, I just WANTED to help. Deanna’s relationship with Chloe reminded me a little bit of me and my sister. Not the overt stuff, obviously, but just the amount of care they took of each other, even when they weren’t around the other. If Chelsea was in a situation like this, I’d want someone to help her as best they could. I knew how much Chloe meant to her sister, and I liked both girls too. I didn’t want to see Chloe gone or Deanna suffer, much less watch either girl die.
“So, how do we do this?” I asked Kane bluntly. “And what do you need me to do?”
“The process is intensive, but not complicated,” he assured me. “It can essentially be divided into five steps. Step one is isolation. We need to seal the souls inside the body individually to suppress them. Once the original occupants are sealed, we then initiate step two and UNSEAL the intruder, allowing it to become ascendant inside the body.”
I blinked at him. “Your solution to them being possessed is to LET them be possessed? This is sounding less like a medical procedure and more like the insistent promises of a guy trying to sell me a moon.”
He snorted. “In order to act with impunity on the invading influence, it needs to be in control. We bring it to the surface so we can act on it freely. Which brings us to step three. Preparing a secondary vessel. That’ll be what I need YOUR help with. When I suppressed your abilities earlier, I got a good sense of your capabilities. Can you imbue a sphere of that crafted material with your Leviathan power?”
That was a good question. I wasn’t sure. Leviathan wasn’t an ACTIVE ability, exactly. Like it was, but not one I could imbue or pass on. It wasn’t like Belial’s toxic fire or Zagan’s purifying flame. Leviathan was an internal state of protection.
Closing my eyes, I started to calculate. What would I need to do to make that happen? I’d need a physical medium, but Agares took care of that, and Agares COULD be imbued with other abilities like the Heretic Fire. Leviathan wasn’t a transmissible state, but I had ways of getting around that too. Piece of Mind could imbue a copy of my mind into the sphere and then I could use Leviathan on THAT.
But Agares wasn’t conjuration. I couldn’t make something from nothing. I opened my eyes to look at Kane. “I need stone. Preferably ground to dust. I can handle B-rank material, but nothing stronger. I don’t have the tools to work that.”
“Shouldn’t be an issue,” he assured me. “The fragment implanted is C-rank, presumably because of the restrictions in place at the location of implantation. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so simple to seal and extract it. A B-rank prison artifact will be more than acceptable. Do you have any specific material requirements beyond rank?”
I shook my head. “No, past that it doesn’t matter.” Whatever he gave me would be reduced to dust and reconstructed anyway. I paused. “Actually…do you think you could get me some A-rank materials. I want to try something.”
Agares was a demon of construction, but his power of disintegration came from Pit of Despair, who had recently merged with BRAD. Brad who could create casual holes in VOID ROADS, which shouldn’t be possible.
He shrugged, waving a hand, and there was a ripple in the air. A block of stone materialized in front of me, plummeting to the floor with a bang that shook the whole room. I nodded my thanks then called Agares to incarnate into me. Just to be safe, I also called up Brad, manifesting his power inside me at the same time, and then I triggered my staff’s upgrade skill, pushing Agares to B-rank.
I focused on the stone, calling Brad’s power through me, and I pushed the power of Pit of Despair to its fullest.
It took a second, then another, but slowly, ever so slowly, the A-ranked stone began to disintegrate. Bit by bit, little by little, dust flaked off it, collection on the ground beneath the block. It took ages. Minutes at a time. I had no clue why the hell Brad could do this instantly to the Void Road but it was taking me the better part of a half hour, but I wasn’t complaining. Theoretically I should NOT be able to disintegrate and A-ranked stone block, no matter how overpowered my techniques or Domain were.
Once it finished, I reached for the dust with Agares. Because Pit of Despair and Brad were one, and Pit of Despair was part of Agares, I could FEEL the dust, like a part of my body that had fallen asleep, slowly coming back to life as the power of Agares filled it.
“This isn’t going to be fast,” I panted. “If that’s a problem tell me and I’ll switch to something weaker.”
“No,” he said firmly. “The better the prison the easier the final two steps will be. Creating a link and then sealing the intruder would normally need to be done very precisely, but if you can construct a prison that can withstand the pressure, I can greatly improve the speed and reliability of the process.” I nodded at that, and then got back to work on constructing the orb.
That took an hour. I had to manually imbue every GRAIN of dust with B-rank power over time to fill them up, like trying to use an eye dropped to fill a pitcher. But I kept at it, pushing forward, and finally all of it was saturated. I reached for Piece of Mind, manifesting a parallel inside the pile even as I slowly sculpted it into a sphere.
It wasn’t a matter of just thinking about it either. When I completed the sphere, it was still rough and patchwork. I packed it all together and then had to slowly polish it, grinding away the excess space inside and purifying the gaps until finally, about three HOURS later, I had a complete sphere of A-rank material. Inside the sphere, a parallel of my mind sat, and it was child’s play to reach out to it and, triggering the rank up ability of my staff again, imbue it with Leviathan.
The sphere pulsed with power, the glassy black surface flickering with arcane green light. I held it out to Kane, my eyes opening as I shakily passed it over to the former god. “How is this?”
His eyes locked on the sphere as he took it, wide with enthusiasm and awe. “That…shouldn’t be possible. You just used some kind of Divine power. But not. What a strange sensation. I’m not sure what to make of that. It is, however, quite satisfactory for our purposes. You’ve done very well. Allow me to complete the rest of the procedure while you recover.”
I nodded slumping over onto my side as I watched him begin the process. He tossed the sphere up casually, and it froze above Deanna, hanging in midair as if sitting on a pedestal. Then he gestured and that same suppressing light he’d used on my descended from above and landed on Deanna again.
As I watched, she began to squirm in place, her body moving and leaving behind a frozen, translucent outline. Then another beam of light descended and another outline was pinned in place. The body sat up with a gasp, eyes flying open, and I saw a glow I recognized from the eyes of that skull on the tower door. The head jerked to stare at me, lips peeling back, but Kane didn’t give Drexel a chance to talk. Lifting a short cane, he smacked Deanna’s body on the head, driving it forward to thump into the prison.
A bright light shot through the cane and her head to touch the orb, and as she drew away, a trail of light came with her.
Grinning maliciously, Kane slammed the cane on the floor and the light flooded the room. This time it didn’t come from above, but from all around us. I watched it slowly close in on Deanna, and as I watched, another outline manifested over her body, this one the same suffocating darkness I’d seen in the tower.
Slowly, an inch at a time, the light surrounded her body and began to contract, condensing the darkness until it was the size of a marble, at which point it pushed the marble down the tube of light connecting her head and the sphere and into the orb, as Deanna fell back to the table, unconscious. The orb flashed, then shook, and I heard a rumble as Drexel tried his best to escape. Wordless screams of incoherent rage wracked the orb as it shuddered and leapt as if trying to escape.
Finally, the shaking stopped, the orb resuming its eerie stillness. Kane tapped his cane twice, the suppressing light shattering and drifting away in the ether. Deanna groaned, and before my eyes, melted away into the familiar form of Chloe, whose eyes fluttered as she woke up. “Owwww,” she moaned, clutching her head. Kane snatched the sphere away before she could bump into it when sitting up, and she looked around blearily. “What happened?”
It was so similar to what her sister had said earlier that I couldn’t help but snort out a laugh. Once I did that, it was over. I couldn’t hold back anymore. I broke down cackling, leaning my cheek against the cool floor as I released all the pent up tension I’d felt on the way over here. I filled her in on what happened, and she looked frightened, but still grateful.
Suddenly, I stopped, then started cursing. Chloe frowned at me, looking confused. “What? What is it?”
“I forgot to get that fucking PHOENIX EMBER,” I snapped. “I was so focused on saving you that I didn’t even LOOK for it!” She stared at me for a second, then SHE started laughing, and I picked it back up. In retrospect, it actually was pretty funny.
Climbing to my feet, I stretched and then offered her my hand, helping her off the table, then I turned to Kane. He was holding the orb in one hand, spinning it on a finger like a ball. “Thank you,” I told him tiredly. “So much. Now, can you bring me this fragment I’m supposed to be carrying with me. And do you happen to have some sort of MAP to the Temple Mount? Or at least a general idea of distance?” From his apologetic smile, I was guessing the answer was no, but that was fine. Guess it was back to the road for us.
Comments
Peter Smith
It occurs to me that this is probably lucky for him. Imagine how much trouble a phoenix ember that has been steeping in the (even partially weakened) domain of a god of subversive corruption. In fact it would probably be better if he "reignited" the elgend of the phoenix with his flame of purification and life.
Malcolm Tent
He's sleeping on the couch for a century lmao.
Melody Haren Anderson
I had went when he left "Wait, did I miss him getting the ember? Is he going back later for it alone since he can purify himself (with Leviathan and purifying fire)?"
Gunnar Crider
Damn he left the loot. Lol
