The Forsaken Hero
Chapter 330: Lives in the Balance

Chapter 330: Lives in the Balance

A/N: Well, somehow I mixed up the order of the Chapters. The mistake has been fixed and Chapter 329: Overwhelming Force has been added in the correct location. Thanks for reading!

I hovered on the edge of consciousness, barely able to register the inquisitor’s demands. Call of Fable? Coughing up a mouthful of blood, I struggled to my knees and clutched at my side. Hot blood spilled between my fingers, staining my dress and dripping into cold blue stone. Another burst of black pixelated my vision, and my body twitched weakly, rapidly losing blood.

The High Inquisitor stared down at me, emotionless. "Do you yield?"

It took everything I had to tilt my head, barely catching a glimpse of silver through my fading vision. "Fable...please..."

The inquisitor glowered and me and raised his spear. "He won’t save you. No one can. You’re going to die, just like that water bitch."

The tip of the spear descended toward my breast, streaming crimson blood–my blood–behind it. It seemed to fall in slow motion, taking forever to cross the short distance between us...no, it really was moving slowly. What was happe–

The twinkle of starlight stilled my thoughts. Through the haze of pain, I’d completely missed the appearance of the stars of fate, and the gentle tug through my soul bond with Fable. He was borrowing the Oracle of Eternity again, something he hadn’t done since our fight against Vithrass.

Fable lunged toward us, disregarding the few living inquisitors frozen behind him. He crossed the throne room in an instant and scooped me up in a massive paw. The motionless spear drew a thin line down his flank as he rushed by, slicing through silver fur and flesh as though it were water.

The world came crashing back with a vengeance as time resumed, and Fable stumbled to a stop, crashing through one of the walls. Stopping time for so long was incredibly draining, especially when Fable was borrowing the power secondhand.

The inquisitor’s spear slammed into the stone, burying itself midway up the shaft. The ground around it cracked and shattered, dropping the inquisitor several inches in the resulting crater. He frowned at the puddle of blood I’d left behind, then slowly turned his head to face us.

"...what?" He blinked several times, then shook his head. "You’re full of surprises, filthblood. But none of them will save you. You and your mutt are exhausted and bleeding. I could leave right now and you’d still end up dying from those wounds."

I barely even heard his words, the entire world fading away. With the last scraps of my consciousness, I cast a Lesser Restoration. The wound itched and burned, continuing to leak blood and refusing to knit together. The spell wasn’t wholly ineffective though, bringing me back and giving me just enough awareness to feel just how hurt I was. Familiar, golden power danced on the wound’s edges, like glassy, molten fire. Sunpurge.

"Fable, did you find Korra yet?" I mumbled. Every breath caused my side to burn with crippling fire, seeping through my veins and resonating with the scars on my shoulder.

He growled softly and the bond pulsed with affirmation. Letting out a groan, I shifted into a more stable position and rested my head in his fur, squeezing my eyes shut against the pain.

"Then go...please..."

The inquisitor tensed as Fable coiled like spring, rapidly chanting a protective spell. Despite his words, he couldn’t help but glance at the city lord’s corpse, as well as the other inquisitors Fable had killed in so short a time.

Letting out a howl, Fable lunged, but not toward the inquisitor. Throughout the fight, he’d been slowly searching for Korra’s soul, using the unique sense that all monsters seemed to have to find mana. She was weak and wounded, but a hero’s soul was unmistakable to a monster as powerful as Fable.

Our momentum carried us through the ceiling onto the level above. The entire fortress shuddered beneath the titanic wolf’s weight, making it clear the structure wouldn’t hold us for long. Fortunately, it didn’t have to, as Fable crushed through several rooms in the blink of an eye. Below us, there was a great burst of mana as the inquisitor gave chase, flitting through falling chunks of rubble, hot on our tail.

"Hurry!" I cried, casting an Aegis to keep the debris from striking me.

Fable howled again and smashed through one final floor, tearing the wall and roof away from a tower on the edge of the fortress. Amid the dust and rubble, I caught a glimpse of white sheets and a powerful soul. Korra!

In one fluid motion, Fable scooped her up and jumped free of the fortress. The force of his final leap sent one last shudder through the building, overwhelming the foundations and causing the entire structure to collapse.

We soared through the air, giving us a vantage over the chaos the attack had caused. The entire fortress was gone, reduced to a pile of rubble. The shockwaves of the battle had leveled many of the nearby buildings as well, but shockingly, there were few casualties. As we plummeted toward the ground, I could make out crowds of people struggling through the streets to the western gates. Already, hundreds if not thousands of refugees streamed across the fields to the Last Light Company’s camps, escorted by dozens of men whose armor gleamed in the morning light. Many of them cast fearful looks up at the sky, many at us, but most at the titanic magic circles slowly rotating above what remained of the fortress.

We landed hard in the middle of a wide mercantile square, crushing a dozen abandoned wagons and pulverizing an entire row of houses. A streak of light followed us out of the billowing cloud of destruction, landing on the street before us, revealing a very angry inquisitor.

"You dare cause so much destruction in a city under my protection?" he roared, "You’ve lost any chance at a peaceful, painless death. As you’re about to discover, even the grace of the gods has limits."

He shouted a few other condemnations, but I barely heard him. Fable laid me gently on the ground alongside Korra, then towered protectively over us. My own pain forgotten, I rushed to her side and pulled her close to my chest, sobbing.

She was alive, albeit barely. Her veins were black and ugly, clearly visible though near translucent skin. Her breath came in shallow, shuddering gasps, and her eyelids fluttered in fitful exhaustion. I sacrificed some of my remaining mana to cast a healing spell on her, but all it did was ease her discomfort for a moment.

In that brief second, her eyes slit open and her hand tightened on mine. "Xiviyah..."

"I’m here," I sobbed, "I came for you!"

"I...I knew you would...the inquisitors...said..."

I held my breath, waiting for her to finish, but her head lulled to the side and she drifted back into unconsciousness. With a sigh, I hugged her one final time before gently laying her on the ground. Judging by the shouts and snarls behind me, not to mention the earth-shattered collisions, Fable and the Inquisitor had begun to fight.

It was finally time.

I reached out my hand and summoned my staff, leaning on it for support. The inquisitor was a blur around Fable’s titanic body, his spear slashing and stabbing, drawing great gouts of blood. Fable roared and howled, but no matter how careful his attack or defense, the inquisitor broke it apart with ease. Truly, the gap between the fifth and sixth levels was not one to be taken lightly.

My tail flicked back and forth as I raised my staff overhead, gripping it tightly with both hands. The movement stretched my side, sending another spike of pain through me, but I grit my teeth and sent the last of my mana upward, into the massive sixth-circle array spinning over the city.

"Elemental Spirit: Earth!"

At my strained cry, the array released a pulse of mana, the magic circles accelerating until the individual runes blurred into a singular line. The mana began to condense into a single point in the center, the place where the spirit would appear. Sensing the disturbance, the High Inquisitor broke away from Fable and stared at the sky in open-mouthed shock, his spear falling limply to his side.

The array continued to accelerate, and I frowned, feeling an unfamiliar force tug at the spell. It was subtle at first, but soon the mana began to riot, rapidly spinning out of control. The solid, earthy aura of the forming spirit vanished as runes began to shift and change on their own.

Fable glanced me over his shoulder, and I shrugged, almost unable to believe what was happening. With the Oracle of Eternity, it was plain to see that there was no powerful mage altering my spell, it was entirely working on its own. The flow of mana wasn’t disrupted or broken, just...guided.

"What the hell are you doing?" the inquisitor cried, panic in his voice. "The report said you could upcast spells, but this? Summoning such a creature here...are you planning on erasing this city?"

I shook my head, not taking my eyes from the spell. Just what was it changing into? "I told you I’m only here for Korra. You can stop this, inquisitor. I’ve only acted in self-defense and will continue to do so."

A burst of cold swept out of the spinning circle, rapidly eating up the earthy aura. The chill of the arctic winds was intimately familiar. My tail curled as I instinctively itched for Fable’s fur, a primal response conditioned by months of cold mornings.

At last, the spell settled down, falling into another variation of the Elemental Spirit, that of ice. The mana quickly condensed like normal, and the temperature plummeted further. Frost appeared on the ground directly beneath the spell and spread rapidly, creeping across the shattered buildings and shrouding blood and corpses in ice.

The world held its breath as a serpentine figure appeared in the circle’s center. I shook my head, hardly able to believe my own eyes. Elemental Spirits weren’t supposed to work this way! They were essentially formless creatures with no tangible substance of their own. They could only control the elements around them, like the earth spirit I summoned after the dragon attack. I’d planned on doing the same thing here and utilizing the rubble, which still held many of the protective enchantments of the original fortress.

It was the inquisitor who finally voiced my thoughts, staring up at the strange, crystalline serpent in the air. "Just what in the hells did you summon?"