Dungeon Duel (Rogue Dungeon 5) - Chapter Thirty

Marek Konig Ustar, better known to all of Traisbin as the Tyrant King, felt the snap of unbinding the moment the World Stone came free of that cur von Graf’s soul. Though the sensation filled him with no small amount of joy, Marek kept his expression impassive. With bored annoyance, he gazed at the captured family of a suspected resistance fighter—a battered and bleeding man, his sow of a wife clutching a screaming baby to her chest, and two more dirty little brats shivering in the snow. The remains of their village—one more little mudhole he couldn’t be bothered to learn the local name for—blazed merrily behind them, the bodies of their friends and neighbors quickly cooling in the wintry air.

“Kill them,” he said. “Start with the youngest and work your way up until he breaks and gives you the Rebel Council.”

“Yes, my lord,” Talise said, not the slightest suggestion of misgiving in her cold gray eyes. Von Graf eyes, equal in color and quality to her blasted brother’s, and yet so very different. Where the boy’s gray orbs blazed with a thirst for revenge that bordered on mania, hers acted like mirrored glass, feigning access while keeping onlookers at bay.

Marek favored the girl with a doting smile. “And don’t take too long. I’ll expect you for tea.”

“Of course, my lord.” She nodded, allowing a calculated hint of granddaughterly affection to touch her expression. But not so much as to be improper.

With a twitch of his hand, Marek called his Ustars to his side and left the would-be scene of magickal slaughter behind. In months, perhaps a year, this boor and his family would crop up in some other little hamlet with new names. Talise couldn’t save every family with rebel ties that they captured, Marek made certain of that, but the little boy and girl hugging one another in the snow had decided the fate of this one.

Ah, Talise… She thought she was so far ahead of him in pieces and moves, but her treachery was as childish as her Rivals strategies and just as painfully predictable. Marek was a creature from another world—a being of space and stardust, of magick so old and potent no one remembered its name. He had seen the birth of galaxies and the death of suns, yet this girl thought she could fool him. It was one of her most endearing traits—the sheer vanity and hubris of it all. Marek could appreciate such grandiose views of self, even if hers were unwarranted.

Better by far to think yourself the rival of gods than to bow and scrape like a dog. Such pride, twined with appropriate talent, could eventually become a truly useful weapon.

Her brother had proven the truth of that sentiment, though in his own way, vainglorious and zealous in his defiance, and as immovable as their father had been. Marek would crush the impetuous fool, of course—an effective ruler could not abide open defiance—but it was a shame. Roark was far more capable than that insipid Lowen, who was little more than a trained dog.

When the Ustars reached their horses and mounted up, Marek cast an illusion of himself to ride to the palace with them. Off the mirror image went at the head of his snake-helmed soldiers. Supposedly, the Tyrant King no longer had the strength to stay out all day quashing rebellions, and that was a ruse he was intent on keeping up for the time being.

Marek had lost a portion of his world-ending power—and no small measure of his peace of mind—when Roark had stolen the World Stone, but even so he wasn’t the feeble old man he pretended to become without its constant proximity. That façade was nothing but smoke and mirrors for his scheming “granddaughter.” The greater the deception, the sweeter the surprise would be when he revealed the truth.

Once the illusion and Ustars had disappeared over the snowy ridge, Marek pulled a rune-etched portal stone from his robes and cracked it. The familiar shimmering tear opened in temporal reality. Without hesitation, he stepped through.

This wasn’t his first travel between the many dimensions that made up reality, and it wouldn’t be his last, though today he didn’t take the time to gaze upon their innumerable facets fanned out like cards in a deck. They inarguably made up a beautiful array, their various magicks and technologies spiraling like distant galaxies, but he had business to be about. Instead, he selected his destination without delay and journeyed into it.

A violent wind tore at his clothes and hair, whipping past as if he were falling from a great height. Colors streaked across his vision, stretching and splitting into their full spectrum, as agony ripped through every fiber of his body. The pain was an inconvenience, but not an unexpected one. No one could be taken apart and entirely reformed into something different and more powerful without some measure of discomfort.

Finally, the alterations were finished.

The pain diminished, the light faded, and the roaring wind became nothing more than a gentle breeze. Marek stepped out the other side of the portal anew.

Black sands whispered around his suddenly sandaled feet. The sky boiled with a low ceiling of ominous green thunderheads, and off in every direction, the pyramidal seats of power of this region swirled with strange phenomena, a combination of weather disturbances and arcane energies.

The Onyx Sands.

According to the Hearthworld accounts he had coaxed Talise into reading to him, this barren landscape was a mere infant, born full of untapped magicks and baleful gods far stronger than the dimension’s previously most robust creatures. Had this Onyx Sands existed just months ago, he would have sent Lowen and his armies to one of these pyramids rather than to the Vault of the Radiant Shield. Now, however, it was time to take matters into his own hands.

Or claws, as the case may be, he thought with mild amusement, glancing down at his new rotting appendages tipped in wicked talons. Powerful sinews flexed beneath flaps of desiccated skin, and shiny scarabs swarmed. Marek had to begrudgingly admit that the power of this land genuinely intrigued him. He had traveled far and seen much, but this world, with its transformative powers and endless lives, held true promise. And, if Lowen could be believed, the world that had spawned this one was a treasure trove of unguarded riches, ripe for the plunder.

A gold-and-lapis staff capped in a falcate moon materialized in his clawed hands, the shaft thrumming with potent dark magicks. Jade bolts of lightning cracked from a brilliant gem the size of his fist floating between a pair of massive crescent horns stretching upward from his skull.

Spidery white lines of text appeared before his eyes, momentarily obscuring his view of his towering new body.

[Welcome, Undead God-Pharaoh Marek Konig Ustar, the World Ender!]

A deep, resonating chuckle rolled from his throat like thunder. The Onyx Sands shook beneath his feet as he turned northward. In the distance lay the Vault of the Radiant Shield and his stolen World Stone. Marek could feel it calling to him, its song a siren beckoning him to come. To burn and ravage and create. The World Stone was his, captured in the bloodiest of conquests. A fragment of the Cosmic Tower that bound all of existence together and shaped the foundations of reality. It yearned to be used. To mold flesh and birth worlds.

With a thought, he summoned the stone’s location to mind. The wind around him picked up, ripping the dunes from their unstable moorings to whirl in a scouring tornado of jet-black sand as it carried him to retrieve what was his by right.