Return of the Runebound Professor - Chapter 763 (Patreon)

Noah walked toward the gray. His feet fell upon the immeasurable expanse of white stretching around him like tiny stones dropped into a lake

Noah walked toward the gray.

His feet fell upon the immeasurable expanse of white stretching around him like tiny stones dropped into a lake. Faint ripples rolled out in his wake, only to fade away the moment he moved away from them.

There was no difference between the sky and the ground. No landmark to measure his progress by beyond the spot of gray. This place — if it could even be called a place rather than a lack thereof — simply was.

No sound accompanied Noah. Not even his footfalls made the slightest noise. He may as well have been a stray breeze drifting through an empty field. There was quite literally nothing at all.

Nothing but him and the gray.

And no matter how many steps he took, the gray didn’t seem to grow any closer to him. It never moved at all. The gray seemed perfectly happy to sit at the edges of his vision, a dead spot on a monitor in the corner of his eye.

Normally, that would have been an optimal breeding ground for thought. When people were trapped in an endless expanse with nothing but their own mind to keep them company, many of them would start to reflect.

They would think on the past. On what they had once had and what they could have become. On the faces that they had left behind and the decisions that they had never made. Life was the greatest — and least appreciated — treasure that man could ever possess. Few truly managed to understand its wealth up until it had been stolen from them.

Perhaps some would have let their mind wander to those memories that gave them strength. To the silent moments spent with their loved ones. To the not-so-silent ones. To the times when they abused the shit out of Mind Meld potions to avoid scarring the ears of anyone within a two mile radius.

Noah didn’t do that.

Well, he might have done a bit of the last one. But aside from that, his mind considered the option for all of a few seconds before realizing the ultimate truth.

He couldn’t fucking be bothered.

Noah had done the whole thing already. It was great the first time around. All the reflecting, all the soul-seeking… it got old. Once was more than enough for him. He didn’t care about the past. It was already gone.

There was only one thing on his mind, and it was getting his ass back to Moxie. Well, her and Lee and Todd and Isabel and — well, the list went on.

But he particularly wanted to get to Moxie.

It didn’t help that Noah’s mind was far from the clearest. Speckled gold flashed through his eyes like falling ash with every step that he took. A twisting fog roiled in his mind and wound through every fiber of his very being as it permeated throughout his soul.

Visions of the Line slithered through the air around him. They were only visions — he knew that. They weren’t actually there. There was nothing here but white.

But he could still sense them. He could still see them. And, were he to step on those tantalizing golden paths, he was confident he’d be able to sense them as well. The Line was with him, whether he wanted it to be or not.

It always had been.

He’d never really gotten away from it. Noah had just closed his eyes. He’d been unable to notice the truth that had been carved into the fibers of his existence.

Now he had no choice in the matter.

Pressure bore down on his mind from every direction. The tiny black pool of memories stood alone in a sea of gossamer golden silk that sought to strangle it until nothing remained. But the pool would not falter. The part of Noah that made him the man that he was today would not allow the infinity in.

That was likely why there was only a single thing Noah felt as he took step after step through that endless expanse of white. It wasn’t longing or regret or anger at what could have been.

It was annoyance.

Would this goddamn second-rate rip-off of infinity get the fuck out of my way? I have shit to do.

Noah had a few more thoughts akin to that first one, but with considerably less polite language.

And then a thought struck him. There was really no reason to just be wandering around at a casual pace. Nothing was stopping him from running.

So that was what he did.

It didn’t help.

The gray remained stubbornly at the edge of his vision.

And so Noah sprinted, the annoyance building within him like water filling a bucket. Every step he took was another drop. The water rapidly rose to fill that bucket, quickly threatening to spill over.

The gray didn’t move.

And then it did.

Anger ignited within Noah like a spark. Eons of frustration finally spilled out.

And, when the next flicker of the Line passed through Noah’s vision, he drove his foot right down onto it.

The world shifted.

There was a lurch, like Noah had missed a step on a flight of stairs. Then his foot slammed down once again. He stumbled forward —

And the gray was upon him.

A mass of limp stone tentacles laid on the ground like a piece of sushi forgotten midway through preparation from a Chernobyl octopus. He wasn’t sure how a sea dwelling creature would have gotten to Chernobyl in the first place, but that was probably a question to ask the octopus.

 The tentacles were warped and crushed like someone had put them into a trash compactor. They showed no signs of movement, nor did they even twitch in recognition of Noah’s presence.

But he recognized them.

The Night’s Shadow.

Noah’s clouded thoughts barely even paid attention to how he — or the Night’s Shadow — had gotten here.

Frankly, he still didn’t care.

“What are you doing here?” Noah asked the crumpled mess of tentacles.

They didn’t respond. The tentacles just laid there in a slumped gray mess.

As far as he could tell, they seemed to be dead.

Good riddance. Evil piece of shit.

Anger swelled in him.

This was what he’d been walking toward. The corpse of the Night’s Shadow, which had inexplicably placed itself in this endless white hell that he’d gotten himself stuck in. That didn’t really give him a lot of answers as to where he was or how he could get out of here.

Is this place some graveyard for eldritch beings? Does that mean I’m an eldritch being?

Nah. Probably not.

Noah approached the corpse. There was no wind here — no way for the holes riddling the body of the ancient monster to sing. No matter how huge they were, they were just piles of stone now.

But if the Night’s Shadow had gotten here, then there had to be a way out. This wasn’t just some part of Noah’s mindspace. It existed. He didn’t know how or where, but it existed in a way that something else could arrive.

And if something else could arrive… then he could leave.

Noah didn’t bother trying to call on his domain. It was pointless. His runes weren’t here. There was nothing there for him to reach out to.  

He ignored the paths of golden light that crawled all around his vision as he approached the body of the Night’s Shadow. If it was here, then Renewal’s Prophet must have sent it here somehow. She’d been the one that had been fighting it.

Even though the monster was positively enormous, it was leagues smaller than it had once been. The Prophet must have done something. Noah didn’t care about that, either. He climbed up one of the tentacles. The holes that had once turned everything in their path to screaming stone were now nothing more than footholds.

His mind swayed like seaweed in an ocean current. Annoyance at the climb passed through him. A line of gold swayed by his vision — he grabbed it.

And then he was on top of the Night’s Shadow, his climb forgotten.

Noah didn’t even pause to wonder at that. He just looked around the sea of white that sprawled in every direction beyond his hollow throne. Then his lips twitched in annoyance. There was still nothing.

He looked down at the corpse beneath him.

Some of the holes in the stone were wide enough for a body. More than wide enough.

Noah dropped into one of them without a thought. It was better than just wandering around forever.

The inside of the Night’s Shadow looked like the cross-section of freshly baked bread magnified a thousandfold. Strands of stone stretched all throughout it in crisscrossing webs. Noah stepped around them, ducking to avoid hitting his head as he wandered.

Golden lines splayed out before him. His foot fell on one—

He shifted. Noah was still inside the Night’s Shadow, but in a different portion. That didn’t even make him miss a step. There really wasn’t much difference between being lost in one place and being lost in another.

All that mattered was finding a way out of here. The option that there wasn’t one didn’t even cross his mind. That wasn’t an acceptable outcome.

The Line appeared before Noah once more.

He accepted its offer, and then he was elsewhere. A new portion of the Night’s Shadow. And this one was more spacious than the previous ones had been. The strands of stone stretching throughout the monster’s corpse were directed inward, as if they were coming from something.

Something deep within Noah stirred.

A crackle of red lightning passed by the flecks of gold in his eyes.

Then he shifted once more.

There were no more strands of stone. Instead, he found himself within a spacious, spherical room. The ground sloped beneath his feet in a gentle curve that built up to the walls. Something prickled against his skin. He couldn’t quite sense what it was — but he didn’t need to.

Floating before him was a rune. The rune was enormous, easily the size of Sunder if not larger. It was also the strangest one he’d ever seen. Seven rings encircled the entire Rune at odd angles like the belts of Saturn had been knocked off their axes. Each of them pulsed with power that set Noah’s hair on end and made his insides twist in longing and unease.

Holes riddled the rune’s gray surface, and strands of power stretched out from it connect to the stone prison entombing them both.

This was no normal rune.

Noah knew that for certain.

He also didn’t care.

Noah strode right up to the Rune. Even though his ability to actually control or feel the magic was gone, he could still read the pattern within it clear as day.

Wretched Symphony

A slow grin spread across Noah’s lips. He didn’t know how this rune alone had managed to manifest itself in the white void… but there had to be a reason it had survived the trip when every other rune hadn’t.

He reached out toward the pulsating mass of scar-ridden gray magic.

There was something within it more than mere magic. Even from here, he could feel it, a gaze lingering on his shoulders like a heavy cape. Intelligence resided within the rune before him.

This was the core of the Night’s Shadow. Not a Master Rune. It felt similar to Sunder… but at the same time, they were completely different. This was something else entirely — and it didn’t want to be stuck in the void any more than Noah did.  

“You’re going to help me get out of here, aren’t you?” Noah asked. “You’re going to get both of us out of here.”

Then his finger brushed across its surface, and the world fell away.