Every inhalation was like a mouthful of icepicks I was forced to swallow. My side ached. The laceration inflicted above my brow by a piece of splintered wood stung mercilessly. I had already ran up so many sets of stairs and yet there were so many left to go. My foot missed a step I almost dropped the Sin of Lust.
"Christ, you're heavy!" I panted as I redoubled my grip around her middle as her manicured nails dug into my shoulder. The woman took a labored breath and forced her legs beneath herself. Somewhere behind us, Berour's caterwauling was enough to raise the dead.
"Left," Amoroth grated through clenched teeth, jerking her head toward the next corridor on the landing. "Go left."
I did as she said, though my knees buckled and we had to stop once we'd cleared the landing. The noise of Berour's pursuit followed.
Once the light had dimmed and the stars blinding my eyes had quieted, I'd grabbed Amoroth by the arm and had dragged the woman from the wreckage of Peroth's office in hopes of escaping the deranged Sin—but he hadn't given up. Not yet.
My right hand was cradled near my chest, rendered bloody and broken by the construct. My will and my intent had given my spell substance and my blood had bypassed the flaws inherent to my design—and the strictures normally used to prevent a backfire. I hadn't taken the time to inspect what damage I'd managed to inflict on Berour, but I knew it must have been extensive if the blood covering my front was anything to go by.
However, my hand was also broken and numbed by adrenaline. Useless.
Despite the months I'd spent wandering Crow's End's many halls, Amoroth knew them far better than I did. She was directing us away from the residential areas of the manor while trying to put as much distance between ourselves and Berour. She had been the first to recognize the futility of involving others in a fight against an enraged Sin. They would only be fodder, deaths to be laid at the threshold of my conscience.
"We're not going to escape him," Amoroth said as she leaned off me and used the wall for support. There was blood on her borrowed shirt, but I didn't know if it was from me or from Berour or from her own wounds.
"He didn't—didn't hit you th—that hard," I managed to sputter between stolen breaths. Indeed, I hadn't thought Berour had gotten that good of a blow in, and yet Amoroth was worse off than I was. The wound her back was healed, but she continued to clutch a hand to her chest just below the hollow of her throat.
The woman snarled and tore her collar from her neck, revealing her chest and a portion of a lacy bra. Where the skin should have been unmarred and flat there were five weeping punctures and a strange protrusion. When I realized Berour must have fractured her sternum with a single blow, I swallowed convulsively to keep myself from getting sick.
"He knew to hit me where Sethan's magic yet lingers," she said as she covered the injury and surveyed the hall. "Balthier has a hand in this. We need to move."
Amoroth and I hurried down the hall and descended a set of stairs that had appeared from nowhere. Berour's screams followed, growing louder when they should have been fading in the distance. They seemed to come from everywhere, from every direction and every hall. I didn't know which way to turn or where to run, and the confusion was almost overwhelming.
The Sin of Lust dragged us through a false wall into a dark, unused ballroom I hadn't known existed. Tables were lined against the walls and flipped on their sides, crowded by stacked Victorian chairs. The chandeliers above were cloaked in dusty sheets that rippled at the slightest disturbance. Our heavy breath and pounding stride resounded in the vacant space.
A cold sensation like frozen fingers dancing upon my skin brought my head up. "Watch out!" I cried, throwing myself into the other woman just before the Sin of Gluttony spilled forth from a burst of shadowy flames. His hand missed Amoroth's head by mere inches. Instead his fingers caught a few menial strands of her hair.
She cursed as she shoved us both into the Realm. The pressure against my wounds was unbearable, but I squeezed my streaming eyes and held on. Moments later we were both thrust back into reality. Amoroth had managed to put several yards between the other Sin and ourselves, but Berour was quickly closing in.
Lone bars of moonlight glanced off the creature's profile. The white of bone gleamed on his ravaged face, spliced with shades of crimson, brown, and the soft shade of pink, scarred flesh. Too many teeth shown in a warped grimace of a face rent and sundered.
My construct had obliterated part of the Sin's chest and head.
His breath strained through the rip in his neck and partially collapsed chest, creating a sound like a vacuum trying to suck air through an obstruction. His black, nacreous eyes rolled in their sockets as the creature shambled nearer.
I hadn't managed to kill Berour, but I had sure managed to piss him off.
"The little human one needs to fear," he seethed as pink spittle dripped from his unveiled teeth. "But I want to break her, I do. I want to break her, and twist her, and nibble and gnaw on her wretched bones!"
He charged.
Amoroth braced herself, yanking me behind herself by the collar of my shirt. "I'm going to regret this."
She and Berour collided with a claxon of shouts and screams on Berour's part. Amoroth brought her hands up and very nearly managed to break the older Sin's neck—but Berour avoided her grip and her fingers slipped off the viscous liquid coating his skin and clothes. He snatched her collar and, with a twisted smile, slammed his head into hers.
The snap of her nose breaking roiled through my veins.
"Amoroth!" I shouted, desperately trying to recreate the construct before Berour ripped the woman to pieces. A second attempt would undoubtedly break both my hands, but all I needed to do was create an opening for Amoroth. If she could get her hands on Berour's heart, this would be over.
His blow caught me off guard. I had been staring at my hands, trying to paint the construct in my blood, and I hadn't been watching him. I yelped when stars burst in vivid color before my eyes and my back landed on the floor. My cheek burned where the back of the Sin's hand had struck it. Peering through my disheveled hair, I saw Berour standing over me, Amoroth thrown aside like an unwanted toy.
At this proximity, the damage I had inflicted upon Berour was horrific, but what was more horrifying was his gleeful grin and the utter blackness waiting between his lashes.
I knew I stared death in the face and I wanted to be afraid—wanted it so badly my hands were shaking with repressed terror—but I held my breath and met Berour's crazed glare with my own.
A recent memory fluttered to life like a fledgling's fragile heartbeat. The Exordium had kidnapped me, briefly. Darius had saved my life before the madmen had been able to shoot me. I remembered sitting in Amoroth's apartment afterward, getting blood on her sofa, and Darius had spoken to me with a pall of pride and severity stealing over his countenance.
"Yes, you are brave. But also very stupid. Courage and stupidity are often indistinguishable from one another."
Despite knowing it was probably the stupidest thing I'd ever done, I spat in Berour's face when he bent to put his hands around my throat. I was glad I was brave and not terrified in my end. I think Darius would have been proud.
Red tinged my vision. I held up my only workable arm to ward off death's hungry embrace—and noticed something was off. My nails were dark, colored a deep violet at the base and a cold gray color at the tip as if they were bruised. The shade was wrapped about my hand, its presence invisible but unmistakable in my mind. It pulsed against my skin, a second heartbeat echoing in response to my own.
Heat enveloped me—followed by a cold so all-consuming it froze the cut on my brow solid. Shadows wound themselves into a frenzy, the slender ballroom windows freezing over with white frost as the moonlight was shredded by Peroth expulsion from the Realm.
The Sin's fury was as magnificent as it was terror worthy.
The floor trembled beneath the weight of his step. Faults appeared in the weathered floorboards and spiraled outward from Peroth's feet as if chasing the scurrying shadows. His body burned with ethereal light like an avenging angel—though I knew he was the absolute opposite of a heavenly being. Darkness bloom within the demon like ink stirring in clear rapids. Tehgrair began to rise from his shoulders in a grim double-exposure.
"Stop this madness!" the Sin of Sloth commanded in a language I knew I wasn't supposed to understand. His eyes were a vivid, gleaming gold, poised below his brows like two polished doubloons. "You won't accomplish what you've come for, Eduardo. Balthazar has sent you to die!"
Berour reeled but didn't flee. His wide eyes were focused upon the ghastly monster peeling itself free of Peroth's body as his blackened tongue flicked through the tear rent in his cheek. On the floor several feet to his left, Amoroth had risen to her haunches and was glowering at Berour. Her eyes were swathed in black hunger and blood still dripped from her broken nose.
"'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden,'" Berour quipped as his wild gaze roved over the two Sins ready to eviscerate him and paused, recognizing defeat. "'And I will give you rest!'"
He leapt for me and Peroth intervened. Struggling, the Sin went down with Sloth's bulging arms tightly wound about his neck for leverage. Peroth's knee was in Berour's back, keeping him in place. The crazed creature clawed deep furrows in the wood as he tried to reach me. Swallowing, I dragged myself further away.
"Stop this, Berour!" Peroth shouted in Gluttony's ear as he viciously shook the Sin. "Stop this before I do!"
"'They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you,'" Berour choked as his short, bloody fingers continued to snatch air and rip the floor. "'The lord Almighty will come with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire!'"
Peroth roared in anger and frustration, the sound scaring me in a way Berour couldn't have ever managed. I saw Amoroth's shoulders droop and curl in upon one another as she hid behind the curtain of her tangled hair.
"Do not do this to me, Eduardo!" Sloth snarled as he tightened his grip. "Do not turn me into him!"
The shade of Tehgrair hovered above him in gruesome mimicry of an avenging angel. The staccato screeches leaving its jawless mouth sounded like laughter.
Though Peroth tried to force reason upon the gibbering monster beneath his weight, Berour was too far gone. His mind was a whirlwind of confusion and violence, twisted to the whims of a masterful psychopath. When he spoke again, his thin voice escaped from his lips in a shriek. "'Wail, for the day of the lord is near; it will come like destruction—will come with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire!'"
Resignation shone deep and deadly in Peroth's gilded eyes. His sharp teeth were bore with revulsion as ice hardened in his wet hair and adhered the damp front of his shirt to his bare chest. Berour made a final lunge for me. I closed my eyes.
The ugly crack of the creature's neck breaking seemed louder than it should be.
With my eyes shut, I could sense Peroth's power as if it was a tangible thing. His presence was a prowling wolf of immense proportion, smelling of branches broken in wild pursuit and of slow-brewed bergamot. The power beat at my very soul as if the wolf had its monstrous fangs only inches from my throat, its hot breath coursing over the back of my neck and along my stiff spine.
I could sense Berour's power as well. He was smaller, frailer, a measly thing wriggling beneath the wolf's crushing paw. When the Sin of Sloth snapped his neck and the sound hit my ear like a gunshot, the ghostly presence of Berour's soul vanished into the wolf's slavering jaws without a trace.
Recognition alighted through my empty thoughts. This was how the Sins killed each other. Their soul cannibalized the mana of the other's until there was nothing left. Nothing at all. The Sins stole mana from the souls of their hosts because their own souls were broken, fragile vessels. As long as they continued to pour fresh mana into that cracked vessel, the dark creatures continued to live, to breathe, to consume and kill. Steal that mana away and devour the energy it gives their tremulous souls, and the Sins had nothing left, nothing to shield their all too mortal bodies from a deathblow.
This was how they killed one another.
I opened my eyes. Peroth stood above the unmoving body of his fallen comrade with his fists shaking as if he were cold. The entire ballroom was white with the onset of an inexplicable winter as snowflakes coalesced in the air and icicles dropped from the rafters. The shade of Tehgrair threw back its malformed head and screamed, its soul-piercing howl shattering glass and ice alike as the entire manor quivered in Peroth's rage.
Berour's sightless eyes stared at nothing and everything. With his broken soul stripped of mana, nothing would be saving him today.
Dawn shook free of the night's vestments and rose above the horizon's limits. None of its light reached the manor's shrouded walls.
The Sin of Gluttony was dead.