The invisible world of energy came all the more clear to Danyael’s eyes. And what he saw now gave him no feelings of comfort. He watched the black energies of the Despoiler blast to the sky as the sparkling energies of his companions swirled around him, each of which providing their own volley of attacks and counters. And then the sickening pale verdigris of Abbadon’s powers made light of the coming foreboding. It didn’t matter what Danyael did at this moment, as he knew he couldn’t escape what was to come. But he knew what he could do after it passed.
He looked to Karl, the elemental both he and Jharm had protected a moment ago. Simultaneously, his sight reached out to Karl and Kith. His will blurred over the landscape as his link with the world itself allowed him the luxury of total omnipresence. Dipping into the wellspring to partake of a taste of the Source, he bid cooperation from the planet beneath their feet to aid once again in their time of need. The cocoon that once surrounded Karl doubled in reinforcement around, if not beneath, him. It was an action made in haste. And if it couldn’t entirely protect him, it could keep him safe long enough to prepare either an escape or another onslaught.
As Kitharsis implores a clever tactic of his own, Danyael’s geokinetic omnipresence reached out to his old friend as the grounds beneath the Tirthandaran took on a scaly surface, reaching deep beneath the roots where the scales would absorb the impact of the flames, each defense dissolving one out of the many scales away, giving his friend enough space to not focus on defense as much as initially needed. The only issue was that this would only serve to add to the coming pain to the Nephilim. So be it, then. He watched the dark viridian comet of Abbadon’s energies streak downward on an impact course with the ground. This was going to hurt. A lot. And then came the pain.
The sensation came quickly, the polar opposite of total ecstasy. It overtook him, smothered him, coated him in an anguish none could ever compare. A quivering gasp preceded a sudden scream of absolute, unmitigated torment as he howled a scream so frightening it could make any seasoned warrior’s blood run cold. He felt his skin curl inward as his knees were forced to buckle, nailing him to the ground. His screams gained in such volumes that his vocal chords almost snapped, and yet he kept screaming, howling, shrieking into the emptiness as if he, and not the world, were on fire. And that, sadly, was just the prelude. The flames curled around him, wrapping him in absolute anguish, twisting torture made physical to coil around him, penetrating him to the core.
He felt his life reach its medium as the physical world began to drizzle away, the emptiness around him beginning to take hold. He felt the warm and cold reach of the other side teetering, the hands of the hereafter reaching for him at all angles. And yet the pain kept him away. The pain kept him centered. The pain kept him... alive. No... the world was keeping him alive. The world refused to let him go. The world refused to let him die. And before he could pull himself free of the threshold, the sudden twinkle of divine light breached the darkness as Jharm’s holy beam punched through the flames. Danyael, through his link with the world, snared the light as it rushed through the flames, allowing the prismatic luminance of the divine anoint the grounds. He forced it deeper until the world devoured it whole; and with it, feeding Danyael.
Danyael’s senses glanced to view his echo, black cloaked warrior identical to himself in almost every way. The echo found itself standing in the very spot where the Nocturne Kenshi had burned an ashen circle into the ground. And it was here where the echo would do what was now necessary. Both swords in hand, he lifted the Fan Blade to the sky, while he held the Culling Blade off to his flank. In a single motion, he cleaved inward, completely slicing himself in half at the median separating the lower and upper torso, letting his blood spill across the engraving as the remains of its corpse dissolve away. The Fan Blade, with no wielder, fell to the center where a whirlwind of crimson vitae screeched across the battlements to engulf the nephilim lord.
With the ritual complete, he began the next stage as the bloody tornado swirled to a halt, splattering the grounds around him with blood. He lifted his hands to the sky, and the sudden change of alteration could be felt among the clouds. The change was slow at first, only to snap to life in an instant. He yanked his hands down and all gravity around Abbadon found itself displaced with a force so strong around the Despoiler that it was a vacuum of pure geokinetic force, aiming no where but straight down.
Imbued with the very fury of the planet itself, a great maw opened beneath Danyael, vomiting an enormous, ichorous ooze in an erupting pillar. The vitae burst into a spreading flock of multiple tendrils of their own, many of which doubly as large as the tongues of green flame. They catapulted toward Abbadon with immense speed, the sudden likenesses of Danyael materializing at the tip of each, shrieking with pure insanity as they careened and twisted around each other, some even smashing into and merging with one another only to sprout just as many copies as before, the screams growing louder and louder so much so that their voices were doubly as intense as Danyael’s previous assault of sound made deadly.
The Nephilim Lord spread through the living nightmare, a new set of weapons readily brandished in both hands; a long, triple bladed staff formed in the likeness of a “Y” and a long, curved, menacing sword forged in the likeness of a bladed feather. While the sword pulsed with an aura of outward violence, the staff gave off an aura of inward emptiness. An essence of eerie hollowness surrounded the staff, standing as the more menacing of the two. It was best Abbadon stay as far away from Danyael as possible now. For if the nephilim lord came within striking distance, his weapons, imbued with the most forbidden essences of his nation, would feed off of the Despoiler; both flesh and soul alike. With a silent command, the tendrils doubled in number before railing toward Abbadon in an explosion of speed while their semi-divine master also vanished in a blurr of hypnotic alacrity, unleashing an unending volley of bladed attacks from every direction around the Despoiler. The consistent, ever growing shrieks around only serving to empower their master while dealing additional adverse affliction to Abbadon's armor, both physical and mental.
His face, like the those of the hundreds of tendrils sprouting through the sky, was frozen in an eternal scream, so defined that his features no longer held the beauty of the nephilim, but the sheer horror of the warp itself. His eyes, now two different shades clashing against one another, mirrored the very chaos of the warp, his prison for so long he no longer counted the days or the weeks or the years, but millenniums in a place with no doors and many doors, no future and many futures, no life and something beyond such. The voices of thousands of presences screamed from the reflection in his eyes alone. And so was it now true that it was more than just the Nephilim that Abbadon was fighting.
