The Storm Guild enforcers stood in a half-circle around the rim of the crater, their lightning-pursued armor humming with pent energy. Maelis Dawnwrath stood among them, her storm-illuminated eyes locked on Arthur with hungry intensity. The air vibrated with coming violence, thick enough to be tasted.
Nyra's nails bit into Arthur's arm. "We have to get out of here. Now."
The Primordial stayed frozen in the middle of the pool, its nothing-face inscrutable. "Hurry, child of Zenith. The storm comes to us all."
Arthur's heart pounded in his throat. All his instincts were screaming to flee, to fight, to do something other than stand frozen in the middle of godlike ones and mortal foes. The parasite wrapped itself tighter inside him, its pulse like a second heartbeat in his chest.
Maelis extended her gauntleted arm. "Arthur Zenith. In the name of the Storm Council, you are accused of high treason and proscribed contact with parasitic beings." Her words bore the weight of irrefutable authority. "Return the artifact and undergo purification, or be killed where you stand."
Arthur's fingers flexed toward the obsidian dagger at his hip. "Purification?" he sneered. "You mean execution."
A cold smile danced upon Maelis's lips. "The guilty always hear condemnation in justice."
Nyra's fire blazed to life, the black-tinged fire sending ethereal shadows dancing along the crystalline ground. "They won't take us without a fight."
The parasite's voice curled through Arthur's mind. "She cannot shield you. Not from so many."
Arthur's eyes flickered between the enforcers, the Primordial, and Nyra's resolute face. The visions from the pool of light tormented him—both the hope of renewal and the fear of destruction. His scars seared hotter, as if answering his frantic thoughts.
Maelis's patience ran out. "Take them."
Twenty of the enforcers charged ahead in flawless sync, their boots crunching on broken crystal. Lightning was building up in their hands, arcing between them in a killing web of electricity.
Nyra did not waste time. She threw both arms out in front of her, releasing a blazing blast of black-fire that struck the leading rank of enforcers. Their armor took most of the hit, but two staggered, their defensive wards overpowered by the wild flames.
"Arthur!" Nyra screamed above the din. "Do something!"
The parasite grew within him, arms of power curling around his skeleton. "Let me in completely. Just this time."
Arthur gritted his teeth. All the past merges had come close to killing him. But as another bolt of lightning hurtled toward them, he acted.
"Fine. Do it."
The transformation was instant.
Agony surged through Arthur's body as the parasite's essence swept through his veins. His scars burned cyan, then black, the patterns radiating like cracks in glass across his body. Knowledge not his own surged through his mind—ancient forms of battle, lost magic, the exact angles required to shatter reality itself.
When he moved, it wasn't by conscious will.
Arthur flung up his hand, catching a bolt of lightning in mid-air. Rather than incinerating him to nothing, the energy wrapped around his arm like a serpent. With a grunt of strain, he bonded it to water extracted from the enforcers' own perspiration and the hidden heat emanating from their armor.
The ensuing blast of superheated plasma knocked five enforcers off their feet, their armor glowing bright red-hot.
Maelis's eyes went wide. "Impossible!"
Nyra stared at him. "Arthur. your eyes."
He couldn't see it, but he sensed the change—the sharpness of his vision to inhuman precision, the way colors washed into alien spectra. The parasite's voice blended with his own thoughts until he had no idea where one stopped and the other started.
"Left!" the parasite warned.
Arthur twirled, deflected an earth mage's stone spear in mid-lunge. He deflected it with ease into another enforcer's stomach, then sidestepped a sonic attack that cracked the earth where he had been.
Maelis shouted commands. "Formation Gamma! Containment protocol!"
The last enforcers shifted into a smooth pattern, their movements choreographed. Lightning cages materialized between them, creating a dwindling perimeter around Arthur and Nyra.
"We're being herded," Nyra realized, her fires lashing at the advancing barriers.
The parasite examined their strategy with calculating deliberation. "They intend to wear us down. Then capture."
Arthur's heightened senses picked up the slightest vulnerability in their line—a callow enforcer on the extreme left whose stance showed uncertainty. He gestured. "There. Make the break there."
Nyra did not ask him. She coalesced her flames into a focused lance and sent it against the marked position. The enforcer was able to just lift his shield in defense, but the force of the blow shattered the lattice of lightning long enough for Arthur to strike.
He darted quicker than should have been humanly possible, covering the distance in three step-blurs. A pinpoint strike to the enforcer's wrist broke the ward bracelet governing his side of the cage. The entire formation shuddered.
Maelis curled her lip in snarl and lifted her own hands. The sky grew darker as she tapped directly into the condensing storm clouds. "Enough!"
The resulting bolt of lightning struck Arthur square in the chest.
White-hot agony erased all thought. He was dimly aware of his body jerking, of screaming that could have been his own or Nyra's. The parasite writhed inside him, its grip failing under the deluge of raw storm energy.
From the fog of pain, Arthur glimpsed the Primordial standing at the center of the pool, observing. Waiting.
"Help. us." Arthur stifled.
The Primordial's face of emptiness tipped. "You have not yet chosen."
Another bolt fell. Arthur rolled just out of time, the blast cratering the earth where he'd been lying. His body protested in a chorus of agony, the parasite's enhancements struggling under repeated strain. Black motes whirled in his vision.
Nyra caught him by his shoulder, yanking him to his feet. "Up! We have to—"
A third bolt hit her squarely between the shoulder blades.
Time suspended for Arthur as he saw Nyra's body convulse with electricity, her jaws wide in a scream that was unheard. She fell like a marionette whose strings had been cut, her fires being extinguished.
Something within Arthur broke.
The parasite took advantage of unvarnished emotion. "Now. Choose now."
Pictures flashed—his father's shattered look when the enforcers arrived, his mother's crying face the day they buried his magic, Nyra's smile when she called him "something new."
Maelis stepped forward, her hands sizzling with pent-up strength. "Last chance, Zenith. Surrender or burn."
Arthur made his decision.
He stretched deep, deeper than pain, deeper than fear, to where the essence of the parasite snaked about his soul. Rather than fighting it, he welcomed it utterly—not as host and symbiote, but as a single thing.
The change was immediate and agonizing.
Arthur's spine arched as fresh scars burst out across his body, creating complex patterns of violet-black light. His bones stretched a little, his muscles reweaving themselves for maximum fighting. When he moved to open his eyes, they flared with the same absence-light as the Primordial's face.
Maelis froze halfway between steps. "What—"
Arthur shifted.
One second he was kneeling next to Nyra's motionless form. The next, he was nose-to-nose with Maelis, his arm already sunk wrist-deep into her armored chest.
Her expression of shock mirrored his own. He hadn't meant to—his body had just reacted on pure reflex.
Maelis stared down at where his arm was inserted into her body. "How."
Arthur curled his fingers within her ribcage and felt something essential burst. "You shouldn't have hurt her."
As he pulled his hand free, it was clean—no blood, no guts. Only slight wisps of smoke rising from his fingertips. Maelis fell, her armor clanking hollowly on the crystal ground.
The rest of the enforcers stood still in shock.
The parasite's voice was now unidentifiable from Arthur's own internal monologue. "Finish them."
Arthur lifted both hands. Power accrued—not borrowed from the surroundings this time, but tapped from some well within himself. The enforcers spun to run, but too late.
The blast of void-black energy that followed did not so much hit them as strip them apart. Armor turned into rust flakes. Flesh into ash during the scream. In a matter of seconds, nothing was left but floating motes of dust.
Silence fell, interrupted only by Arthur's harsh breathing.
The Primordial's voice boomed across the crater. "You have chosen, then."
Arthur turned slowly. The parasite's awareness flooded him—he knew now what the Primordial really was, what it desired. What it dreaded.
"I decide balance," Arthur said, his voice full of the parasite's resonance. "Not your artificial harmony. Not their blind order. Something else."
He stepped over to Nyra's lying form and knelt beside her. He placed his scarred hand flat on her chest without thinking. The cyan designs burst, and energy passed between them—no healing, not exactly, but something more profound. A sharing of essence.
Nyra jerked back to consciousness, her eyes snapping open. They were different—the ember-gold now striped with the same void-light that marked Arthur's.
"What. did you do to me?" she grated.
Arthur assisted her into a seated position. "Gave you a fighting chance."
The Primordial watched this with seeming fascination. "You make new rules as you go along. Risky."
Arthur stood in front of its void-face. "You wanted me to decide? I decide to walk my own way. Your war ends here."
The earth shuddered back. The surface of the light pool seethed furiously.
The parasite in Arthur stiffened. "It's angry."
Nyra made her way to her feet, testing her newfound strength. "What now?"
Arthur observed the Primordial's body start to shift, its edges unraveling into the light. "Now we run."
As the initial shockwaves of the Primordial's anger splintered the edges of the crater, Arthur seized Nyra's hand and sprinted for the mist-covered plains beyond. In their wake, reality itself began to rip asunder, the sky hemorrhaging unnatural hues as the ancient creature's wrath took hold.
The parasite whispered in their ears as they ran: "This is only the beginning."
Arthur didn't reply. He simply ran, Nyra at his side, toward whatever future they'd just irrevocably changed.