Liria stood in the gray dawn of the Ashen Wastes, carefully tuning over Seris' words in her mind.
Her younger brother was right, the confirmation of a controlling intellect behind the fragments of the dead god changed everything.
There was no longer time for leisurely experimentation, this was now a race to see if she could purge Seris of his taint before the dead god Vhal did something irreversible.
Her younger brother was safe for now. Probably. The dead god Vhal influenced the world by manipulating Seris' mana, and his reserves were currently empty.
This bought her roughly half a day. The moment Seris' mana refilled to meaningful levels, Vhal would be back with a vengeance, and he would not be hiding this time.
Liria exhaled slowly, steadying herself. Speed mattered more than safety now, and that meant making a choice she had hoped to avoid.
The Ritual of Inversion.
Her fingers tightened slightly.
Kaerthis' amulet was never meant to be more than a temporary place-holder, and Necromancy Negation was still a work in progress that she wasn't sure about. It could take days for her to get any meaningful results.
This left her with a ritual that might twist her younger brother into something unrecognizable.
The admission was bitter.
"Seris," she carefully looked him in the eye, her voice low and serious to impress upon him the gravity of his choice. "The ritual I'm about to attempt is dangerous and untested. It will turn your taint into holy power, but it will also change your body. Are you prepared for that?"
"I'm ready." Seris answered her immediately. A pause. Then: "But how will my body change?"
"I am not sure." Liria was forced to admit. "The ritual was originally designed to be used on a place of power, not a person."
She compared the Font of Corruption in her memories to the Font of Light she'd only seen in pictures, mapped how that inversion would translate to a human body, then absentmindedly continued.
"The soul is a microcosm of the land; the same inversion arithmetic should apply if I can keep the feedback loop stable. I believe that your hair and eye color will change. Your appearance would likely become more in line with holy aesthetics."
She paused, working through the list methodically.
"Your short hair might become long. Your sallow skin and weak body could become healthy. And if you're short for your age, then you'll probably become tall..."
Her voice trailed off.
Seris was looking up at her with an expression of adorable confusion, his head tilted slightly to one side.
"Big sister?" Seris ventured. "But those sound like good things."
Liria replayed what she had just said.
"They are optimistic possibilities." She said it with as much gravity as she could muster, which was undermined slightly by the fact that she was now avoiding his eyes. Perhaps the Ritual of Inversion wasn't so bad after all?
She stopped that line of thinking immediately.
"The point is that you will have a completely different appearance after the ritual, and even that is the least of your concerns."
What was she thinking? Of course it was bad.
"Your personality could change, Seris." She met his gaze again, her expression grave. "And that cannot possibly be okay."
Seris' brows furrowed. He still looked more puzzled than frightened. "But what does that mean exactly, big sister? How will I change?"
Liria pondered how she could best explain this to a child.
"You like bacon, right, Seris?" She asked and got an energetic nod in response.
"How about pot roast?" Seris nodded even more vigorously to this question.
"Then what about me?" Liria had to suppress a blush while asking this question, and Seris' answer was both enthusiastic and immediate:
"I love big sis the most in the whole wide world!"
The child was just too cute, but this was not the time. Liria fought to keep the corners of her lips from quirking up and solemnly continued:
"Then after the ritual, you could end up as a child who hates bacon, hates pot roast, and hates me the most in the world. That is what it means for your personality to be inverted, so think very carefully about this, Seris. Please."
"Oh." His face fell. For a moment, it looked as though she'd told him the world was ending.
The moment was very brief.
"You said my personality could change." He caught the distinction immediately. "My body will change. My personality only might. So it isn’t certain."
"That's correct." Liria kept her expression carefully neutral. "And that is precisely the problem. There are too many uncertainties."
In the end, she could only weigh the worst cases against each other and pick her poison. If she used the ritual on Seris, the worst outcome was a corrupt priest: dangerous, but recoverable. If she did nothing and left the dead god Vhal to his own devices, Seris could die, or be consumed entirely to serve as a vessel for the Lich King's rebirth.
"I will do everything in my power to prevent the worst from happening," she said, "but we're risking your body and soul, Seris. Only you can make this decision."
Seris looked at her for a long moment. Then: "I trust you, big sis." He nodded resolutely. And that was that.
It was time for Liria to have a good talk with her siblings. She would need their help to ensure the optimal outcome, and she had already kept them waiting for long enough.
But before that, a quick detour. She needed concrete proof that she knew what she was doing. Liria wanted to enter the discussion as an equal, not as their helpless youngest sibling who only knew the world through inherited wisdom and half-remembered dreams.
The Ashen Wastes called to her. It would serve well enough as a demonstration.
Liria dismissed the Blessing of Light's Quest Window that had appeared in response to her resolution.
Mythic Quest generated: Cleanse the Ashen Wastes. Accept / Decline
She felt Seris watching her as she oriented herself, her attention shifting outward, past the immediate surface of things. His presence beside her was a small warmth against the cold of the blighted air.
"Big sister," he said, after a moment. "What are you about to do?"
"I'm getting ready to meet my siblings," she said. "I'll introduce you soon. You'll like them."
"Your siblings? Like Vaelir?" Seris pouted. "He was mean."
Liria chuckled and ruffled his hair.
"He just needs a little time. Now, stay close to me, Seris. This shouldn't take long…"
In the future she erased, Liria had two pet peeves. One was the one-sided corruption of humanity's champions and holy places. The second was the disgusting efficiency of her enemy's sacrificial rituals.
It was frankly ridiculous.
Step 1: Gather power from the Outside Void by sacrificing people at the key points of an unholy magic circle.
Step 2: Use that power to kill every living thing within the circle. Offer those lives as further sacrifice. Accumulate more power.
Step 3: Reach across the infinite Void with that accumulated power and summon a greater demon from the Outside. Direct it toward more death.
Maximum murder for minimum effort. It was plain unfair.
So naturally, Liria had attempted to subvert the technique for her own use, and she had gotten quite far too before being forced to concede. Her revision was unfeasible in a world as broken as the one she'd inhabited.
But the world was no longer broken. The natural order was intact, the World Soul uncorrupted, and the undead treated by the world itself as the infection they were. The conditions were right. It was time to try again.
Liria reached out with her mind.
She pressed her awareness through the dead surface of the Ashen Wastes, through corrupted strata that resisted like scar tissue, deeper and deeper, until she found the World Tree’s roots sleeping in the dark below: vast, immaculate, and patient.
She spread her consciousness through that root network, her mother's world-spanning circulatory system, feeling the slow pulse of life that moved through it even here, even under all this blight.
When her awareness encompassed the full breadth of the Ashen Wastes, she overlaid a magic circle across it, drawn in her mind with the precision of long practice. Then she made her request: Please, she asked the World Tree. I need your roots near the surface, at the points I've marked. Just briefly. I'll make it right.
Her plea was answered. She felt the roots begin to stir and move beneath her feet, felt her mother's reluctance through their shared link, the slow ache of pain as those roots pressed upward through corrupted soil. A wave of guilt moved through Liria's chest. She sent an apology through the connection and a promise, wordless but sincere: she would fix it. She would make it better..
The World Tree's roots broke the surface.
They emerged like slender columns of white light in the gray morning, shining with steady warmth against the dead landscape. The undead came for them immediately, converging from across the wastes in lurching swarms, skeletal hands clawing at the roots, teeth scraping against bark that did not yield. Their hunger for life energy was single-minded and relentless.
Liria reached out with her mind and negated their existence.
Step 1: Gather power from the world by sacrificing undead at the key points of a grand magic circle.
She moved from point to point across the vast circle, not with her feet but with her awareness, adjusting the flows of energy, connecting the lines. With each cluster of undead she negated, the world resonated, a low vibration she felt in her bones more than heard with her ears, power accumulating like water gathering behind a dam.
The lines of the magic circle began to manifest physically, scoring themselves in white light across the gray plains, blazing from horizon to horizon, so bright they threw shadows even under the overcast sky.
A tug at her sleeve pulled her back to her body.
Seris stood beside her, mouth slightly open, staring out at the lit horizon. The first real sunlight the Ashen Wastes had seen in decades was falling on his face, and it painted him in pale gold.
"Big sister," he said, his voice hushed. "What's happening?"
"You have nothing to worry about, Seris." She reassured him. "I'm just doing some light cleaning before calling my family over. Give big sis a few minutes, we'll talk after this, okay?"
Seris nodded, still staring. He turned slowly in a circle to take in the blazing lines spreading across every direction, the Ashen Wastes transformed into something like a diagram of a star.
"She calls this… light cleaning?" Liria thought she heard him mumble, but her mind was already diving back into the ritual.
She watched as all across the Ashen Wastes, the undead burned in white flames. Each one that ended fed more power into the circle, and more into the world beneath.
Step 2: Use that power to erase all undead within the magic circle. Offer their end as tribute to the world. Accumulate more power still.
The earth beneath her feet changed as she worked. She could feel it happening through the soles of her feet, a slow exhalation of something long held. The blight was releasing its hold, and in its absence something warmer was moving to fill the space.
The perpetual gloom that had pressed down over the Ashen Wastes began to thin and lighten. The flat gray ceiling of cloud broke apart in patches, and for the first time in what must have been decades, morning sunlight fell on that dead ground.
The soil around her deepened in color, gray becoming brown, brown warming toward something that could, in time, support life.
The smell changed too. The cold-iron taint of blight faded. What replaced it was faint, barely there, but real: the smell of clean earth after rain.
Seris made a small sound beside her. She didn't look, but she could feel him there, watching.
When the accumulated power reached its peak, Liria felt it: the impossibly vast consciousness of the World Soul turning its attention to her. The sensation was not frightening, but it was immense, the way standing at the edge of an ocean was immense. Everything else became momentarily small.
State your demand, daughter. The voice of the world was not sound. It was the world becoming briefly aware of itself through her. For one suspended moment, Liria was not a person standing on corrupted ground. She was the ground. She was everything the ground remembered.
I wish to summon all those who lived on this land from a hundred years ago, she replied, and the reply did not feel like speaking. It felt like the world recalling a wish it had chosen to forget. From the moment just before impact, when the dead god's remains fell upon the world.
Step 3: Reach across time with the world's power and summon the land's inhabitants from the past.
The magic circle blazed, light that went past color into something the eye could feel rather than see. A connection formed, stretched, and locked into place. The barrier between now and a century ago thinned before her like silk held up to a candle. She could feel the other side of it, the weight of a different moment in time pressing back against her from the other direction.
But, as she had expected: not enough energy to complete the summoning. Of course there wasn't. Reaching across time couldn't possibly be as simple as reaching across the void; that third step had been born from wishful thinking, always more hope than plan. She had included it anyway, because Liria had never quite been able to stop reaching for the things she was told were impossible.
In a bygone future, she had hoped to summon her siblings from just before their moment of death. Disappearing in such a manner wouldn't be too different from death, she'd reasoned. History should be able to correct itself without causing a paradox. When Liria failed, grief had consumed her, and it was at that exact moment that she had first thought of rewinding time.
Her siblings were alive in this timeline. They were well, and whole, and waiting for her. The Ashen Wastes were cleansed, ready to receive new life. She had done enough.
Asking for more would be greedy.
The memory of the death knight's final moment surfaced without warning. She remembered the echoes of ancient lords, the pride and the grief of people who had died committed to something beyond themselves. She had witnessed their final courage and sacrifice. She had promised to carry on their legacy.
Liria had never been good at settling for good enough.
Just a little more.
She reached across the connection, pressing against the thinned, wavering boundary between eras, feeling it strain beneath her touch. Something gave, a sensation like a membrane yielding, and Liria felt herself slip through, her consciousness drawn backward into the past.
A mountain was falling.
No, not a mountain. The dead god's burning skull covered the sky, blotting out the sun.
Amidst distant screams of defiance, magical barriers sprang into existence and shattered like glass before its descent.
Lucien Halvoryn, the last prince of Brighthold wept atop the Sunspire, looking up in despair. A shattered sword lay at his feet, blood flowed from his lips, and his aura had burned down to the final embers. Blood flowed from his hazel eyes as he burned his lifeforce, preparing for a final suicidal charge.
He turned, noticing her presence, and the look on his face was the relief of answered prayers.
Lucien Halvoryn knelt before her, as naturally as breathing, head bowed in reverence.
"Goddess of Life, oh great mother," he entreated her, "please save your children in their hour of need."
This was their first meeting.
No. Wait. I just wanted to impress my family. Why does this always happen to me?