Chapter 4

Chapter 4

[You have opted to keep Blessing of the Crow, Tier 1, as a permanent ability.]

*BOOM*

The shock wave that radiated throughout his body was like a thunderstrike to his soul, and he fell to the ground gasping for air with incomprehension while his innards felt like they were violently rearranging themselves. His eyes went wide and bloodshot as green, black, and crimson lights illuminated across his skin in strange patterns before shimmering away to present elsewhere—causing burning sensations wherever they went.

His eyes rolled back into his head, and everything went black as his body spasmed, but from somewhere deep inside him...his consciousness began to emerge again.

Only it wasn’t...it wasn’t aware of his surroundings. Rather, it was aware of who he was as a person...of his desires and the reasons for having them. It was almost as if he was in a meditative state, and all the pain from his body rapidly disappeared as his senses dulled to make way for this new wave of inner sensation.

Then, from somewhere within the jumbled thoughts and chaotic disorder of the rampaging energies running through his body...a glowing sensation of warmth began to emerge.

He saw them now—the green, crimson, and black lights. They were digging through his thoughts, tearing at them only to piece the thoughts back together one by one until the lights sensed this core.

It was the core of his soul.

The lights began swimming through the jumbled chaos to get to it. He watched as they surged forward, clinging to one another and then accumulating their energy into one mix and match of a swirling vortex as it came face-to-face with the inner ball of energy Riven’s body contained.

Gently, ever so gently, the vortex reached out...and touched the essence of who and what Riven was as a being.

Instantly the connection became solid as tendrils of that bright orb stitched themselves to the vortex of darker power until it was able to stabilize the vortex—calming it into a slower-moving pool of light that exchanged energies with the core over time.

[You are now permanently oriented toward the Unholy Pillar. You may not bind to any other Foundation Pillar, but you may now specialize in subpillars related to the Unholy Foundation Pillar.]

[System Message: Congratulations on your acquisition of a Foundation Pillar and the first step on the path toward greatness. As a newly acquainted citizen to Elysium’s multiverse, it is pressing that you understand the basics. There are six Foundation Pillars of power with which you may choose to align yourself in striving for the top, each with their own major subpillars. In turn, each of these major subpillars has its own innumerable expansions that lead down pathways to power through insight to the Dao. The foundational pillars and their major subpillars are as follows:

Cursing and wiping his bloodied nose, he groaned a bit and stood up—only to realize he was at yet another crossroads. This time, however, as he examined the passages in detail, he got no reward for doing so. Nor was there any sign to clue him in which way to traverse. But...as he chose the rightmost passage that led upward through a flight of stairs and then dropped back down through a hole in the floor into yet another hallway—he found himself staring at a door.

It was old, carved out of marble, and very out of place given the colors of the rest of the labyrinth thus far. A single, smooth door handle of a medieval make sat at chest level, and with a shrug, he pulled it open. He hadn’t seen any reason why not to.

That, he found out, was a mistake. At least according to his nostrils.

A current of foul wind, heavy with the stench of the dead, pulled him in—sucking him inside like the hand of an angry god had come to grab him—only to slam the door behind as he fell into a pit of dried-up, indistinguishable corpses and innumerable statues...

There were two familiar statues, actually. There, on the floor in front of him in the flickering light of the torches...were two people he recognized from the group who’d made it to the top of the pyramid. An old man and a slightly younger woman—both turned to stone. Both missing their eyes and tongues...both having clawed bloody handprints into the back of the door immediately behind him. Some of their fingers were missing, and many of their toes were gone as well. Their faces were set into a silent scream, and it was probably one of the most horrifying things he’d ever laid eyes on.

“Don’t be so dramatic with your gawking...” A deep and feminine hiss echoed out from behind him and farther into the room. “They just didn’t have what it takes... You may not share their fate if you play my game properly... Maybe...”

Riven found that his jaw had been opened without him realizing it, and he shut it before slowly turning his head to look farther in—past the piles of dried corpses—past the two stone ones—and toward a...a medusa?

He cocked an eyebrow, curiously inspecting the scaled half snake, half woman figure that sat coiled upon an elevated stone platform in the center of a rectangular room. The torches here were far brighter, warmer, and even her smile seemed inviting. She was what he would consider beautiful, with the exception of lacking legs, but she was not hard to look at. The snakes that made up her hair were a bright green, her eyes glinted gold, and she wore no clothes as she sat coiled around her serpentine lower half with a sly smile.

Despite the eyeballs and tongues lying there on a plate in front of her while she tapped her clawed fingers on a glass table with a...with a chessboard?

“Sit...” she invited, motioning to a spot across from her on the opposite side of the table with two of her slender fingers. Immediately, a shoddy wooden chair materialized out of thin air to descend from a foot above the ground, gently touching down.

He kept his eyebrows raised, slowly coming to his feet and hesitantly walking over to the table while eyeing the chessboard. Then he glanced down to the chair, and then to her again where she remained smiling with wicked white fangs bared his way under beautiful golden eyes—eyes that he specifically avoided meeting. “You want me to play you in a game of chess?”

She didn’t reply, merely waiting for him to sit as the snakes of her hair aggressively hissed and snapped at him. The way she looked at him gave him the feeling that he shouldn’t trust her—screamed at him not to trust her—and his base instinct was to run... Unfortunately, there was nowhere to go. The way out had been sealed already, and he saw no other door beyond the piled, withered corpses of victims long dead.

Other than the chessboard, next to the plate with the eyeballs and tongues was a long, slender knife made from silver that was coated in blood down to the handle. The plate also had an odd, out-of-place set of words along the white ceramic rim, and the center of the plate acted as a mirror in the middle.

“Chess...is truly a game of wit...” the medusa hissed, her long green snakes shifting in unison as they looked him over with the occasional baring of fangs. Her slender fingers came down to the board, putting the tip of one finger on one of the splendidly carved wooden rooks and then gesturing to the other pieces. “White or black?”

His eyes narrowed. It’d been a long time since he’d played chess, but his father had made it a habit when he’d still been around. “White.”