LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL-Chapter 75: You Ate My Children

Our bones shatter, and our flesh tears up. We are the Angels and the Damned, the First and Last. Oh Father, what else should we sacrifice for only one gesture of yours? Cruel, powerful Father...

Inscriptions found in the depths of the Maw

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For the first time in his life, Elias dreamed, or he thought he was dreaming; he could no longer be sure.

He was standing on the edge of a cliff, and he heard the sound of water slamming against stone. Elias looked down and saw that below him stretched an ocean of golden light.

This was extremely strange; a part of him knew that this should be water, but instead he was seeing liquid radiance, rolling in slow, burning waves. Elias felt his heart skip a beat, and his eyes were drawn to the sky, and he saw that it was cracked just like the moon that represented his Elder talent in his Lumina Space.

The cracks were deep fissures leaking red, as though something inside the heavens was trying to claw its way out, and its actions were causing the heavens to bleed red.

Elias looked down at his hands, and he gasped in surprise when he saw that they were his old hands, small and mortal, the ones that had once sharpened spoons into knives and spent years learning to craft every tool that a mortal like him was able to get his hand upon.

He grimaced as pain swept through his fingers, and then his nails lengthened, drawing blood as they turned pearly white. His nails were unnatural, as if they had become crystals. His fingers became claws, then blades, then a twelve-foot spear of purple light.

Seizing the spear and feeling the weapon hum in his grip, hungry and eager, Elias muttered, "Am I dreaming?"

Elias had never dreamt before, but he had read about it, he knew that some could be vivid and others were fleeting, but according to most of what he knew about dreams, knowing you were in them made the dream fade away, but this was not what was happening here... this cliff, this ocean of light and the broken sky seemed so close to him like nothing he had ever seen before.

"Is this a dream or something else? Ah, I need more knowledge about the effects of Lumina and the fragment of a god inside my body." Elias sighed in irritation.

A soft and wet voice emerged from behind him, which still had enough weight that it almost drove him to his knees. It used the unknown language of the creature he had slaughtered, but Elias did not need the intervention of the Passenger because he was able to understand every word.

"My little broken godling... You ate my children. You drank my gold. Why do you still run?"

Elias slowly turned, like a beast in the sights of a predator, fearful that a sudden move would set them off.

Standing a dozen feet away from him was the woman in the golden palace robe who was sitting inside his Lumina Space with a smile on her face.

Her beautiful face possessed an animated quality that was almost ethereal, and her hair was clean blond, cascading to her waist. She smiled at him, and Elias could not help but smile back. There was something of beauty and peace in her face that could calm a crowd of bloodthirsty warriors. However, why did she say those words before that sounded threatening?

Then her face began to change, her eyes turned milky white as blind as her mutated children, and black tears began to fall from them. Hundreds of thin umbilical cords trailed from beneath her robes like a bridal train, each one ending in a tiny, perfect baby hand that opened and closed.

She smiled, and her teeth were like a shark’s. Elias suddenly knew that this person was different; there was someone else here. This voice was the sound of the goddess, and the fear in his heart could only come from sensing this being that should be dead but did not know the meaning of the word.

"You killed me. But I am still here. Inside you."

Elias felt a faint tug behind his breastbone, and the Pillar of Sorrow pulsed once, warm, almost comforting. Then the nine purple marks on his chest lit up, and he heard them, hundreds of small voices chanting in a language he almost understood. The voices of the children brought a heavy weight on his shoulders, and he was fixed in place, unable to move, and only the quiet hum of his spear and the pulsing of the Pillar of Sorrow inside his chest gave him any comfort.

The mother stepped closer. One of her cords reached out and brushed his cheek. If he could move, Elias would have flinched because the touch was cold and burning at once, and then she spoke, and he could smell the death of multitudes inside her breath, as if her stomach was a container to store all the dead bodies in the world.

"You have my gold now, and my sorrow, but you are not complete!"

Elias felt an uncomfortable pull at the bottom of his stomach as the scenery around him blurred. It was as if he were standing still, and the world was moving. When this blurring stopped, his heart skipped a beat as he discovered that they were back in the Fragment, and a small part of his mind screamed at him,

"Elias, why do you think you ever left?"

He was back in the Fragment, in the broken structure where he had killed the mutated creature with hundreds of abominable babies, and the woman, or the goddess wearing her skin, was gone.

Her absence seemed to be removing the spell of immobility on him, and he could slowly move just his head, but with this level of mobility, the first thing he did was to turn to that narrow crack where the child had slipped through, and his eyes widened when he saw that the boy had his backs turned to him and was pushing his head through the crack as if he wanted to leave... then he stopped and began to slowly turn around.

Elias struggled to move as the boy saw him, and he smiled. He began to walk towards him. The boy took a single step, and he vanished, reappearing precisely six feet away from Elias, too close for his opinion, as the serpent-like appendage trailing between his legs seemed to hiss, and his yellow eyes were clear and amused while he spoke.

"I told you I will end you when you return more whole, but you are a smart little dog, and you came back to me still broken, ah, but you fit so well inside her; perhaps I should take a little taste."

The boy smiled. His teeth were too many, and they appeared too sharp, and he began to reach towards Elias, who had never stopped struggling to free himself.

The moment the hand of the boy neared him, Elias felt the weight of the spear settle on his arm, and he knew he had regained his mobility. Without any hesitation, he thrust the spear forward, and it passed through the boy like smoke, making Elias’s eyes twitch.

The twisted child laughed, and Elias hated how innocent it sounded.

"You can’t kill what was never alive."