Kastori Restorations (The Kastori Chronicles Book 4) (20 page)

Get up, Celeste. Rise.

Slowly, as the hot feeling dissipated, she rose. Her legs were weak. But she grabbed her sword and held it up, ready to fight.

“It is finished
,” Tapuya said, its voice much weaker.
“You have obtained two of the most powerful concentrations of magic in the universe, in the form of red and white magic. With these powers at your disposal, you can defeat Typhos. What you do with him once it is done is up to you, but Celeste, you must be prepared to kill him if necessary. Good luck.”

She staggered over to the platform and collapsed to one knee as it rose in through the planet. She sensed for Cyrus.

He’s still alive.

But no time to waste. No time to recover. You have to get him out of there.

34

“Hahahahaha.”

Typhos’ laugh seemed to echo through the pit as he stared at Cyrus. Cyrus felt his arm weakening, but he would not run.
Don’t leave. You cannot leave until Celeste grabs you. She can teleport you. She will decide when the battle ends.
He stared at the man Celeste called his brother and saw nothing about him that resembled a sibling.

“You have quite the sister, leaving you here for your death,” he said.

“You make some weird assumptions, Typhos,” Cyrus sneered. “It is not I who will die here, it is you. And my sister did not leave me. That is why she is family. Because she doesn’t kill those who are blood. She helps them. Maybe you wouldn’t be this way if you didn’t try and kill her!”

“Enough!” Typhos snarled as he raised his sword and charged.

Cyrus, with his sword skills, deftly deflected most of the attacks that Typhos delivered. He started with a horizontal swipe that Cyrus easily blocked. Cyrus tried to counter by swinging Typhos’ sword down and bringing his own up, but the evil one reacted by using his magic to push Cyrus back on the ground. Cyrus quickly rose before Typhos could even take another step forward.

“I admire your guts,” Typhos said. “Most of your kind simply trembled as I killed them.”

“Most of my kind don’t have the power that my sister and I do,” he said, and he waved Typhos over—away from the place where Celeste would return.

Typhos charged again, bringing his sword over his head and down on Cyrus. It came with surprising force, and with Cyrus’ weakened arm, he did not stop the attack entirely. Their blades collided, and Typhos pressed down, his sword reaching closer and closer to Cyrus’ skin. Soon, his blade had reached Cyrus’ shoulder, where it dug in.

“Know that the pain you feel is only a fraction of what I have experienced in my lifetime,” Typhos growled. “No matter how long I torture you, no matter how much I drag your death out, you will not suffer as much as I have. And that drives me mad. It makes me even more deter—”

Cyrus ended his talk by driving his knee into Typhos’ gut, causing him to bend over in pain. Cyrus delivered a swift uppercut, still holding his sword, to Typhos’ mask, knocking him to the ground. Cyrus raised his sword and drove it toward Typhos, but the evil one again used magic and shoved Cyrus back. Typhos rose, his mask dislodged. He raised it off and spit blood on the ground before placing it back on his face.

“I have had enough of your pathetic attempts,” he said.

“You call getting bloodied from an uppercut pathetic? You have a high bar of pain. I would like—”

“Silence!” Typhos raged as he charged at Cyrus.

Cyrus held his sword up and deflected Typhos, but Typhos chopped vertically repeatedly, trying to break down the defenses of Cyrus. Cyrus held his blade aloft, but every attack seemed to burn a new fiber in Cyrus’ shoulder as his arms grew weaker.

“Die! Die! Die!” Typhos roared.

Cyrus crouched down, reduced to dropping to one knee to deflect Typhos’ blows. He felt his arm collapse and his body open up. He backed up on his butt and avoided getting hit on the head or the chest, but Typhos’ sword sliced his left thigh. Cyrus groaned in severe pain as he backed up. Typhos stood over him, wiping the blood from his leg on his robes.

“You are crippled and stand no chance,” Typhos said.

But Cyrus refused to back down. Carefully, gingerly, he rose on his good leg and spat at Typhos.

“I don’t need to beat you,” Cyrus said, the pain ravaging his senses. “I just need to hold you off long enough.”

Celeste.

She’s coming back.

“Pathetic,” Typhos said. “You would accept defeat rather than charge for victory because your sister is returning. What a coward. I will kill you before your body collapses to the ground.”

Typhos advanced slowly and menacingly on Cyrus. When he got in range, Cyrus swung his blade from his right shoulder down. Too wounded to deliver an accurate blow, however, Cyrus swung with barely any force. Typhos easily caught the blade and swung it in the opposite direction, removing the sword from Cyrus’ hand.

“Farewell, Cyrus,” Typhos said.

“Wait!” Cyrus cried out, with enough of a shout that it froze Typhos’ sword at its zenith.

Typhos, with confusion on his face, held the sword high but did not chop down. Cyrus had no intention of saying anything else. He just wanted a chance for support to arrive. If that support arrived, the battle would swing in his favor.

“You tell me to wait yet you give me no reason to wait,” Typhos growled. “You are defenseless, and you have no weapon. Time to die.”

She’s back.

“I don’t need a weapon.”

He and Typhos turned to see Celeste furiously raise her arm at Typhos. She pushed him away with such a powerful red magic spell that he crashed through the planet, his body creating a tunnel as it collided with the ground. He went back several feet, disappearing from view.

“I have Celeste,” Cyrus spat.

Then, with the loss of blood starting to overwhelm him, he fell to the ground, alive but desperately needing help.

35

The force with which Celeste drove Typhos into the planet shocked her more than the absorption of the energy itself. Her magic forced his body through dirt, rock, roots, clay, and caverns. Though Typhos still lived, he lay so far into the planet that she could not see him, and did not think she would see him until on Anatolus.

When she lowered her arm, she looked to her brother, shaking on the ground in shock, one of his legs sliced open. She jumped from the platform to him, ignoring the weariness and fatigue from taking Tapuya’s power, and leaped over plants and dirt to him. She collapsed to one knee, examining the damage.

Cyrus had lost a great deal of blood, but fortunately, Typhos had avoided hitting Cyrus at a critical artery. The damage thus looked worse than it was and did not require emergency or sacrificial levels of magic. Celeste placed her hands on his leg and closed her eyes, her mind now viewing her brother through the prism of magical energy. She commanded the leg’s wound to heal, sewing the injury back up. Her brother shot up in shock, but Celeste ignored the shrill cries of pain that came.
Heard it before on Vostoka. Keep going.

The healing process took nearly half a minute—far longer than his skeletal healing on the wintry planet, for his current wounds were not as cleanly defined as then—but at the end of those thirty seconds, Cyrus had a usable leg once more. He groaned as he put his hands on his forehead, breathing slowly.

“Try not to wait until I’m a second away from getting a sword to the chest,” Cyrus said, followed by a vicious hacking.

Celeste felt too exhausted to say much of anything. She’d absorbed the power of two planets in just a few days and had fought the creations of Typhos and the man himself. Resting on her knees, her entire body feeling like it would give out in a matter of seconds, she put her hand on Cyrus’ shoulder.

“I think it’s time to get out of here,” she said. “We got what we came for. We’ll deal with our brother later.”

“If he’s our brother, he’s—”

But a loud roar interrupted the short-lived conversation. Celeste knew the source of the roar and took her time turning her head to Typhos. With the adrenaline of saving her brother removed, she saw the figure of Typhos haggardly walking over, blood dripping from his body—
his own
—and his walk a limp.

“Haven’t you had enough, Typhos?” Celeste asked, slowly rising to her feet.

Her brother growled and grunted but said nothing. Celeste did not wish to waste the opportunity and continued speaking.

“You almost killed your own brother. You come here planning on destroying another planet. Even if you ignore that, even if you choose to say that that doesn’t matter, I have the power of two planets now. You know that I am stronger than you. Typhos, please, just stop.”

Typhos gave a huff, but then it slowly morphed into a disturbing laugh that gained volume and speed as it progressed.

“You may have taken most of the power of this planet,” he said as he raised his arms, pointing at the dying vegetation around him. “And in doing so, given it a torturous existence in which all life suffers and all vegetation decays. But you have not taken all of it. I will show it mercy. I will give it the death it deserves.”

“Typhos, what are you doing?!?” Celeste cried out, but she could feel the ground beneath her begin to shake. Pebbles bounced on the ground like oil on a hot stove. Monstrously large aviants above flew, but with seemingly no sense of unified direction. The air grew cold. “You destroy all on this planet just for a fraction of my power?”

“A fraction of your power from this world is all I need!” Typhos roared, his hands raising higher and forming fists. “I will take the magic I absorb from this world and build an army of monsters that will crush Monda! I will create a legion of beasts so frightening that you will lay down your arms the day I show them to you! You will have no choice but to surrender or watch humanity butchered by the swaths of creatures I bring.”

“Typhos!”

But a green energy field began to surround Typhos.

“Behold! The greatest black magic in the universe! Ultimus! Tapuya shall die!”

“Brother!”

But Typhos did not react, and the green field became too dense for Celeste to even see Typhos anymore. The shaking became more violent as Celeste stumbled backward into Cyrus, who was still lying on the ground despite being healed.

“We gotta get outta here, Celeste! It’s too late.”

Celeste knew it was too late.

“I—”

A crack formed underneath her, and she rolled with Cyrus away from the crack as the planet split where she had just stood. But then more cracks formed, and Cyrus hugged Celeste tight.

“Get us out of here!” he yelled.

Tapuya split where they stood, and the two tumbled down the open world toward an indeterminable death.

“Celeste!” Cyrus yelled. “I’m not letting go. We die together, or we teleport out of here together.”

Focus. Focus. Nothing else matters.

Celeste closed her eyes, entrusting herself to her brother’s arms as the two flipped through the air. Tapuya groaned around them, the sound of rocks cracking and more fissures forming. Heat began to overwhelm the young girl, but when she buried her head into Cyrus, she closed her eyes and ignored all of the outside sensations.

The rush came in the feet first. A loud crack destroyed Celeste’s hearing, but to her surprise, she had become so focused and so powerful that just two seconds after she first felt the teleporting sensation, she and Cyrus were back on Monda, in front of the warehouse, still holding on to each other.

“Cyrus! Celeste!”

The shouts from Crystil got Cyrus off her, but Celeste remained on the ground, using her powers to see the world through Typhos’ eyes.

He had encased himself in an energy field that made him immune to the destruction around him. Trees crashed into open crevices. Lava exploded up into the air, reigning hot embers upon the once-beautiful forest. Wildlife screamed everywhere, their deaths inevitable in the face of sheer destruction.

“Stop! Typhos! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

But he had become so enraptured with the annihilation of Tapuya that he did not respond. Celeste could only watch in horror as Typhos and his energy barrier lifted up above the planet, observing from the comfort of space. Tapuya collapsed on itself, the entire planet becoming covered in hot lava before imploding in a blinding light. Typhos teleported back to the near-peak of Mount Ardor, and he slowly walked up the stairs.

“I will be waiting for you, Celeste,”
he finally said.
“And when you come, our final battle will begin. You will kill me and end my suffering, or I will destroy you and your world, and I will end my suffering. If you do not come, I will come for you when I am ready. Enjoy your last days of freedom… sister.”

Celeste had nothing left to see and closed off the vision herself. She sat up, her eyes not moist or wet. She had cried all of the tears she would cry until her fight with Typhos had reached its end.

Cyrus offered her his hand, which she accepted. She dusted herself free of the dirt and debris from Tapuya and looked at her worn-out but determined brother and Crystil, concern on her face.