Return of the Runebound Professor - Chapter 769 (Patreon)

Noah was hearing voices. That really wasn’t that uncommon. Perhaps that in itself should have been a warning sign. Generally, when one heard

Noah was hearing voices.

That really wasn’t that uncommon. Perhaps that in itself should have been a warning sign. Generally, when one heard voices that weren’t their own, it was a solid indicator to get some sleep or see a doctor.

But life was subjective. That, more than anything, was becoming deeply apparent the longer he spent in this white void. One could say that hearing voices was a bad thing. But Noah had heard voices every single time anyone had ever spoken to him. That was how speaking tended to work. Nobody could be surprised that they received a response while in a conversation.

It could be reasoned that hearing voices wasn’t a problem in itself. One could stipulate that the actual problem was hearing voices when nobody else was around. And, were that the case, then Noah may have been in trouble.

However — one could then argue that the existence of conscious thought was a voice. Nobody was surprised when they had an internal dialogue. Noah was having one of those right now, and it felt perfectly normal.

And if an internal dialogue was normal, then hearing a voice within one’s head was equally as normal. It was, after all, his own voice. That should have meant everything was as it should have been.

Unfortunately, there was more than one voice.

And that set Noah back to square one…

Almost.

Noah had already established that having a voice within his head should be a fairly logical and normal thing. That voice was his own. It was just called thinking. Even though an unsettling number of people stubbornly refused to ever utilize the technique, it was still a perfectly legal and valid stratagem.

The issue Noah faced was that he was thinking a bit too much. There were three voices in his head. And that, he was pretty sure, was likely a bad thing. It was a simple conclusion to draw. One voice in the head was good. It was thinking. More voices in the head was insanity.

But there was an exception. Like all things in life, there was a loophole in even this. Noah may have had three voices within his head…

But every single one of them was his own.

“You’ve drifted off again,” Noah-2 said.

Noah blinked. His fingers had started to go slack around his bow and the note he’d been playing had transformed into a sad, deflated whimper. He hurriedly pulled the song back on track, barely managing to salvage the Formation he was making before it crumbled.

“Thanks,” Noah said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “Slipped away for a moment there.”

There was a certain art to ruining Formations. He’d already been pretty good at it before he’d ended up in this white void. Now, he was rapidly approaching the point where he’d dare to call himself an expert.

Noah didn’t have the faintest idea how many times he’d created and destroyed a Formation. He didn’t know how long he’d been trapped here. Noah didn’t even know if there was an end to the void.

A part of him felt like he’d been building and shattering formations for an eternity. Another felt like it had only been a second. The rest of him was pretty sure the answer laid somewhere in the very small, inconsequential difference between those two.

He’d drained his only accessible rune thousands of times over by now. Hollow Symphony had been his lone non-Noah companion, and it hadn’t been a great one. It didn’t like talking much.

Then again, he had more than enough voices rattling around in his head at the moment. An extra really wouldn’t have helped the situation much. It certainly wouldn’t have changed anything.

There was only one thing that mattered, and it was getting out of here. It didn’t matter how many times Noah had to piece a Formation together and shatter it. It didn’t matter how many times he ran out of magic. It didn’t matter how many times he had to chip away at the endless expanse of white.

He would escape.

It was not an if. It was a when.

But that when was being a little problematic. Noah had no doubt that he himself would endure. All three of the voices in his head agreed on that part. It was the lives of everyone else that were a little more concerning.

Moxie. Lee. Every single student, demon and human. The other teachers. Every single person that Noah had come to know and care about. They were still back on the real world, and only the gods knew what was going on.

Will I miss weeks? Years? Decades? I — no. I can’t accept that. I will escape. And I will do it before anyone is gone. I will not be gone for years of their lives. There’s still too much to do. Too much to see. Success is the only result I can allow.

“Then you should focus more on the Formations and less on the thinking.”

That was Noah-3. His voice was, just like Noah-2 and Noah’s, entirely within Noah’s head. It was the same voice that they all spoke with, but there was something more within it. Something distant.

There had been a time when Noah hadn’t understood why. Now he did, and he wished he didn’t. The Line bore memory after memory through his mind in flashes of golden paths. He didn’t want them, but it didn’t care.

They were part of him. Spider had contained them for a time. He’d kept those ancient thoughts wound within the web that he’d woven to protect Noah-2 and Noah. But the web had been burned.

The cage was gone, and the Line was free.

There was so much. And there was so little. So many memories, and all of the same thing. One footfall, a thousand, a million. All different. All the same. All relentlessly pounding, the march of a one man army advancing unto infinity.

Those memories bore down relentlessly on the edges of Noah’s mind. They frayed his thoughts like a thousand little shards littered in their path, ripping into everything he dared focus on.

But still he marched.

Still he created Formations.

Still he destroyed them.

Still he mined away at the void, the notes of his song haunting the vast emptiness all around him.

Chips of smokey white nothingness clung to his clothes like smoldering embers. They prickled against his skin like freezing flecks of snow, but he ignored them. There was no point trying to brush anything off. More would soon replace it.

No traces of the spot where he’d started remained, and no hint of where he was going had emerged.

Noah wasn’t sure if one would be aware that they were going insane. He certainly wasn’t exactly sane — but fortunately, one did not have to be sane to march.

And march he did. Through the voices buzzing in his head and the twisting pathways of the Line shimmering by the edges of vision to taunt him, the army that was a lone man marched.

There would be an end.

There would be a path back to the others.

And he would find it.

***

There were two minutes left before Sebastian died.

His feet pounded against the ancient stone as he stumbled down the hall, blood leaving a painfully obvious trail in his wake. A fading heart drummed desperately in his chest. It hadn’t quite managed to register what the rest of his body already knew.

He was dead.

The tips of his extremities were numb. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore and every step he took sent the numb zone covering his legs creeping farther up toward his chest. The only thing still keeping him going was the adrenaline tearing through his veins.

That, and the deep resilience that resided within every human. The part that refused to admit that the end was upon them. His body refused to give in. Not now. Not when he had finally proven his life’s work.

After hundreds of years of searching, he’d found it.

The Lost Citadel. The Bleak Palace. The Grave of the Last Lord. There were a dozen other different names that it went by through history. The list of mages that had gone searching for it were nearly as long as its history.

But, if Sebastian didn’t find a way out of here, he doubted his own name would ever even make it onto list of mages that had gone missing while in search of this place. It had been supposed to be his fortune.

The proof that even he, a lowly Rank 5 mage, could be worthy. This discovery would have been enough to get him into any faction he wanted to. It should have changed his life forever.

And, in a way, it had.

Just not in the way he’d wanted.

A copper key suspended on an old chain slapped against his collarbone with every stumbling step he took. Just a few minutes ago, that key had been his most valuable possession.

Now it was to be the payment he took to the ferryman of the afterlife to buy a faster passage.   

Legs skittered across the ground behind him. Dozens of them, and all belonging to the same beast. He could see the chitinous black limbs, their tips ending in jagged points, in his mind. He could still feel the pain of them piercing though his flesh, cutting through the artifacts he’d brought like butter.

And its face — he could still see its face. Features frozen in an agonized scream, mouth stretched open by rows of fangs far too wide to fit. Hatred burning within a pair of molten red eyes.

It was intelligent. Intelligent enough to let him find what he was looking for before it struck. Intelligent enough to let him run. Intelligent enough to ensure he wouldn’t escape.

The results, Sebastian had no doubt, of the very Rune Experiments that had buried the Citadel in the first place. Every record he’d read had said the efforts here had failed. That no valuable research had emerged from their techniques, and the Citadel had simply been abandoned and forgotten. They’d said it was nothing more than an old ruin with a few valuable artifacts lost within it.

Evidently, the reports had been wrong.

A bitter smile twisted Sebastian’s lips as he continued to stumble forward. This kind of discovery was enormous. And now it would die here, likely not for the first time. Only the gods knew how many other mages had stumbled down these very halls, the weight of their failure dragging them down like a chain around their legs.

Sebastian turned the corner, stumbling into a small square room. He took a few steps in.

And then he stopped.

There was no door on any of the other walls. It was a dead end.

He swallowed.

The magic here was thick. Wrong. Something had twisted it into a miasmic knot. Even if Sebastian’s runes had been strong enough to let him fight back, the Runic Pressure within the Citadel was already so intense that he could barely call on them.

This room was even worse. Some ancient ritual must have happened here. There were still imbuements covering the walls, but he didn’t have time to read them. His eyes were more caught by the old, dry blood covering the ground around him.

He wasn’t the first one to die here.

The brought me to its dining table.

Slowly, Sebastian turned. His hand rose to the key on his neck. The click-chitter of the approaching monster grew closer. Slower. Like it was savoring the moment.

 He stumbled back until his back pressed to the wall, his heart slowing despite its desperate attempts to keep beating. There was no time left.

Something else sang in the distance. A screaming, almost like the howl of a soul tearing out of the afterlife. Perhaps it was planning to use his own as compensation for its escape.

Sebastian slumped down. A trail of blood followed his back as he sank to the floor. The clicking grew closer. The shadows lingering around the door he’d just come through seemed to grow longer.

A warped face emerged in the dim light. What had once been human was now anything but. Curved fangs jutted from between torn lips, grating against each other as the monster’s jaw unhinged, a hungry hiss pouring out from within it.

The body of a centipede slithered behind the monstrosity, pulling it farther into the room. Its eyes remained fixed on Sebastian.

 He tried to call on his Runes, but it was pointless. He couldn’t even muster their strength. The strength was fading from his body so rapidly that the only thing he could hope was that he would be dead before the nameless monster struck. Then, at least, the pain would be over.

 Nobody will know. I will vanish, and another will arrive here. In a year, in ten, in a hundred. And they will meet the same fate as I.

Regret burned in Sebastian’s heart. His fingers tightened around the key. Darkness encroached at the edges of his vision. The monster loomed over him, its jaw clicking as it slowly retched open like some rusty old mechanism.

The only emotion within its beady red eyes was sadistic hunger. Death was coming for Sebastian, and it couldn’t come fast enough. This thing knew how much time he had left. It was enjoying every last moment of suffering it could inflict — and he knew it wouldn’t let him slip from this world peacefully.

 If there’s any god listening… please. Give me something. I’m not asking to live. My death is already written. But don’t let me go like this. Destroy my body. Rot my spirit. Lodge me within the throat of this monstrosity. Do what you will with me. I do not care. Just allow me revenge against this wretched thing.

The screaming was louder in Sebastian’s ears. Perhaps it was the afterlife itself waiting to drag him into it. Sebastian bared his teeth as his vision swayed and darkened. At the very least, he wouldn’t go begging. He wouldn’t scream. That satisfaction, at least, he could deny.

“I curse you with every scrap of my being,” Sebastian snarled. His words were distant and faint to his own ears. “Someone will come for you, creature.”

A crack echoed through the air.

The monster froze. It hadn’t come from its mouth — and it hadn’t come from Sebastian either.

Brilliant white cracks split the air before him like someone had cracked reality itself. Pressure crushed what little breath remained in Sebastian’s lungs, but he didn’t even care. He was too far gone.  

The screaming song reached a creshendo.

Reality shattered.

Pure white shards of magic, so bright that they seared the darkness in Sebastian’s vision like the sun itself. They spun through the air before him in a gentle rain to shatter against the ground, leaving a cracked hole in the fabric of the world.

And from within the hole in existence stepped a man. Buzzing trails of jagged, triangular magic jittered around him unnaturally. He wore a tattered jacket uniform that Sebastian didn’t recognize. But the man’s eyes — they were like the sun had been boiled down into a brilliant golden nectar.

There was no iris. No pupil.

The only thing within them was brilliant molten gold. They seemed to run for a thousand miles and a thousand more, endless portals plunging into infinity.

And, as the man’s foot landed on solid ground, the screaming filling the air around him was joined by a new sound.

Laughter.

Manic, crazed laughter, a bubbling wellspring of hysteric amusement pouring out of a well that had been dry for years. It rang through the room and boomed in Sebastian’s ears like rolling thunder.

A new emotion passed through the monster’s hateful gaze.

Fear.

It lurched forward, any hopes of an enjoyable kill abandoned, jaw prying open to bite down on the newcomer’s neck.  

Sebastian tried to gather the air to call out a warning. His attempt failed. The pressure was too intense and he was too weak. He could do nothing but watch.

The man’s golden eyes flicked back.

His head tilted to the side.

A branching storm of angry red magic exploded out from his palm. It tore through the monster, in an instant, adding a new scream to the cacophony tearing through the room.

There was an instant of stillness. The wretched monster froze, locked in place as jagged snakes of energy arced through its entire body.

Then it fell apart into a thousand different pieces. Chitin clattered down to the floor as bloody chunks of meet splattered alongside it in a rain of viscera and gore.

Disbelief tore through what little thought Sebastian still had. It was clean. Methodical. The monster hadn’t just been killed. It had been undone. This was no mere mage. Whatever magic this was, it was nothing like he had ever seen.

My prayers. They were answered.

The corners of Sebastian’s lips twitched. His head thunked back against the wall.

There was no more screaming. No more agony. He could barely feel his body at all anymore. Everything was soft. Distant. The world became nothing more than a fading pinprick, but still he held on.

With every final scrap of energy Sebastian still had, he reached to his neck. To the key hanging from the chain. And, as the man turned back to him, Sebastian’s fingers wrapped around his life’s work. They trembled, barely even able to grasp it.

“Thank you,” Sebastian whispered, forcing the words through numb lips. His fingers pulled at the key once more.

“Please—”

“Where am I?” the man asked. There was something odd about his voice, as if multiple people were all speaking at once. Madness lurked in the shadows behind every word he spoke. His golden gaze locked with Sebastian’s.

Death reached for Sebastian. Its icy fingers wrapped around his neck. They tightened like a noose. His lips worked, but no sound emerged.

Obsidia. The Lost Citadel in Obsidia.

He wanted to answer his avenger’s question. But he couldn’t. Death had come for him. His prayer had already been answered. The gods would grant him no further grace.  

“Not yet,” the man whispered.

His eyes lost focus slightly. The fragments of white light shimmering around him undulated. Flickers of gold sliced through the air around them and formed into a cobbled path before him, but the man ignored it. Black veins sliced down his arm and obsidian magic twisted across his fingertips.

He looped a finger through the air next to Sebastian’s neck.

The noose stopped tightening.

All the disbelief swirling through Sebastian’s fading thoughts magnified a thousandfold. It was impossible. But here, in his final moments, there was no room for falsehoods. No time for them remained. He could not deny the truth that burned before him.  

Even if but for a moment, with nothing more than a single finger, the golden-eyed man had commanded death to heel.

And it had obeyed.