This story is by no means a winner, (you might even find it horrifically boring in comparison to its peers) however it proved an entertaining writing experience and the basis for a really fun foundation for flavor.
Apologies, the planeswalkers involved more represent the powers of oldwalkers, coupled with the humanization associated with the post-mending 'walkers. It's a little contradictory, but again, my apologies.
The idea behind the story was conceived in a manner similar to how the Weatherlight Saga began. Rather than formulate the story from the beginning, it starts in a relatively middle area chronologically, (as Weatherlight did with Rath and Storm). The conceptual idea behind this was that instead of providing the answers and lore in the story, inject brief instances of flavor that create a diversity and atmosphere that compels one to learn more about the setting, the characters, etc.
That being said, the "duel" in question is more cerebral than physical. The hope is that by minimizing the amount of characters and environments, the focus on the development of the antihero S'hala, and her unnamed antagonist, (consistently addressed by pronouns), come to the forefront.
The story jumps between past and present frequently, I hope I made this fluidly apparent.
Attempting to reduce these elements creates an odd, almost existentialist approach to Magic fiction, although still relatively enriched in high fantasy and by extension several mediocre tropes.
Anyway, sorry to bore you, enjoy the story (hopefully).
Coronation
Assassin, why do you persist?
Another tremor; this one more recent than the last. S'hala made note of the unsettling frequency of each upheaval, it meant she was close.
Assassin, he called her; a moniker she had both defied and embraced. S'hala had long since cast off her cloak of altruism, though deep within she yearned for the sense of honor and morality she had once seen as her security against malevolence.
Your naivete blinded you. I have given you sight.
Again the shifting earth echoed his damning voice, deep unfathomable condemnations which danced across the desolate crags.
Sight? S'hala hissed, her own thoughts seethed with blood. Better to be blind than to see as you do.
Her derision was met with silence. It was time for her to move again.
---
She had endured a tour of worlds all held under his dominion. Each plane was an eternity of torment and suffering, infinite hells all orchestrated by his hand, malformed to serve his will. S'hala's was not the first, nor had it been the last.
This had to be the end. This plane was barren, devoid of life and barely sustaining the blackness that had consumed the other worlds. That same blackness that tainted S'hala with each new domain of his she visited.
You become more like me with each passing world, Assassin.
I share no kin with snakes and vermin, as you do.
Your memory forsakes you, planeswalker. Do you forget Koromir so readily?
---
Koromir. To S'hala, it was an uninterrupted respite of true beauty. A world of unerring grace unshadowed by malice. Bounty and blessing little mattered above Koromir's greatest value to her, it was her home. From the moment her eyes first opened, witnessing the benevolent scatter of skies, to her crowning ceremony as heir to her nation. A year's life in Koromir was worth a thousand in turbulence, and S'hala would have gladly traded one for the other.
S'hala had no idea that her peace and tranquility was on the cusp of turmoil. Koromir was changing, it apparently had been changing for centuries. The subtlest of touches had been gradually shifting the tides of power. Like sand gracefully beckoning beneath the fingers, the people of Koromir shifted; a veil of sanctity woven before their eyes. S'hala, like her forebears, lived in the bliss of ignorance.
He took that veil away. Ripped the wool from their eyes like it was nothing, and in the place of peace, conflict arose. The manipulations of a greater power incited war. S'hala did not know how, and never believed she would know how he managed to turn Koromir from a place of order into bedlam. Her people succumbed to battle, crumbling nations like dominos. Pennons lowered and swords raised, Koromir turned on itself.
A world at war became one without reason. When all had lost the will to think, he descended. It made sense, why work when you could have others do it for you? His beast-like omniscience cowed Koromir into submission. The cowards submitted their crowns in his power, tearing the once strong bonds between brethren. Without the unity to strike back Koromir capitulated nation by nation. Some became slaves and others sacrificed.
For what? A generator? My world, my people, subjugated to be his thralls. Why? To no grand ignoble scheme, but as fuel. We were once a proud people, and he made us coal.
---
You are as much my child as you were Koromir's, Assassin. Am I not as benevolent as any father? Am I not so kind as to give you the gifts no others can give? Yet how do you repay me? You sever my tongue, break my limbs and bind me. But still I love you so, come, come so that I might see you again once more.
He beckoned her calmly. Never since they had first met had he ever raised ire against her. Instead his voice was always calm, a subtle venom that wormed its way into the nerves. But still I love you... Yes, he shared their relationship as a father to a daughter, coiling his words so that their tumultuous war was nothing more than the petulance of rearing a child. The analogy wasn't lost on S'hala. With each world she visited of his, she learned something new about herself. His will was a skeleton key, gradually unlocking the paths in her mind which may have well been better off locked.
---
Years passed on Koromir where S'hala had no longer seen the light of day. Madness bled into her mind, shifting from order into chaos. The root of her inner conflict centralized on the umbilical cord that siphoned life from Koromir; the generator.
Under the guise of freedom, S’hala rallied the Korrin people to her cause, masking her intent from those whom she had entrusted her idealism.
Koromir stood no chance of overcoming their enigmatic dictator, she believed. Instead, they faced a slow suicide that would effect generations well beyond S’hala’s own.
The climax of her plans came in the form of a grandiose assault on the generator. While the Korrins dealt with the occupying oppressors, she stole away under the cloak of battle into the inner core. Confronted with this grand nexus of mana, all her anger and malice propagated a rage unmatched, the culmination of hatred unleashed a devastating spell that would rupture the core and ultimately decimate Koromir in a heap of uncontrolled mana.
In the ensuing devastation, her manifested hate sparked a destiny far greater, moments before the blanket of destruction would consume her and Koromir, a trigger executed the inner artifice of her soul; the blinding light of judgment disappeared, and S’hala ceased to exist on Koromir.
---
She was cast wayward into an infinite Æther, storms of nothingness cascaded into the ethereal. In the realm of eternity, the two of them passed one another. She, a lost satellite drifting into the empyrean, him, a hoarding miser scampering to see what had become of his treasure. Though the moment in which they collided could only have been fractions of a second, in that time both beings divined the essences of each other. A bond had been formed, an inescapable tether that could have only cultivated in calamity.
---
S’hala had crash-landed in a foreign plane far from the once bountiful fields of Koromir. Though it was alien in all respects, she found her ignorance banished from the corners of her mind. Every race, every fauna, all the minutest details had been privy to her through him. Yet with all of its grace and elegance afforded through that knowledge, she could only see one thing.
This world belonged to him.
His taint lingered, grafted malice that somehow sunk into the nerves of a serene, tranquil world. That was too much for S’hala. She knew what she was capable of doing now, that death was preferable than the life he had stored for them.
So began her vendetta. Sewn with seeds perdition, she cultivated her newfound powers for the purpose of ending his cross-planar tyranny, destroying each subsequent world that he’d taken as his own.
He adopted the moniker “Assassin”, chiding her acts of mass genocide with benevolent reproach. Where, he reminded her, was S’hala’s moral foundry? The catharsis of justice? The ideals of reason or duty?
They did not disappear, S’hala started. Only evolved.
---
S’hala dismantled him with the precision of a surgeon. In the beginning he had sought to rebuke her hatred and focused his machinations towards stopping her march of bedlam. Such actions proved folly, their chance encounter endowed her with the weapons from which she could destroy him, the incalculable power of knowledge. S’hala chased him into his deep corner of the multiverse, ‘walking across time and space to confront his presence and eradicate it.
The wisdom she gained developed into omniscience. Each plane she excised granted her gifts of power, harvesting a desire to ultimately subjugate him as he had once did her. She would not merely destroy him, she thought, but reduce him into nothingness, grind his being into a powder of ashes.
---
The world she now inhabited no longer bore titles. Like the antechamber of some primeval king, it carried no evidence of ever occupying life. Rather, he had hollowed out the world in the fashion of some make-shift office. S’hala saw it differently. She had ensured that this world would no longer serve the clerical; it would be his coffin.
This world had been reforged from the raw earth, taking the sea and stone and converging them with an architect’s careful conciseness. Floating spires of rock created make-shift stairways, ascending higher and higher into the blood-stained heavens.
Since she had arrived, he made punctual visits to her person, his invasive presence arriving in the form of an unseen voice accompanied by a bellowing tremor.
Sometimes their conversations ended almost amicably, a recollection of their eternal conflict. More often, S’hala unleashed wave after wave of vitriol, the building pleasure in ending him boiling like a kettle.
As she camped in the cusp of one of the floating rocks, a faint voice lingered on the wind.
Turn back, my child. Please, set aside your condemnation and let your better judgment guide you to safer sanctums.
---
The voice was not his. No, S’hala was stunned to hear such familiar emanations, as she knew the man who spoke to her now was once her father. Once. In the final days of Koromir, S’hala’s father Kahlim had stood beside her as one of the greatest advocates for rebellion. She had used her father’s great charisma to reunite her people into ultimately fulfilling her plan to end their suffering. When her spark ignited, she had believed Kahlim to have fallen along with the rest of Koromir; incinerated into nothingness.
But as S’hala had learned the inner complexities of her tormentor, so too did he in that split-second of conjoining, know everything about S’hala’s existence.
In a bid to stop S’hala’s rampaging trail of destruction, he conceived an agent of his own. On the rime-bitten world of Hjil, S’hala was confronted by the form of her father.
Not unlike now, he spoke to S’hala with the caring grace only afforded by a parent.
“S’hala, my child. What have you become..?”
His words cowed her. Unable to admonish this macabre puppetry she fell upon her knees in the blistering snow, weakened and wearied as almost a millennia of fighting caught up with her. “Father..” she whispered, the remnants of her conscience struck her with the precision of an arrow. “Am I not what Koromir has taught me? Do I somehow forsake our creed of justice?”
Kahlim approached his grieving daughter. “You act in the cause of justice, but as I have perceived, you are naught but a blade that cannot choose its path.”
“How do you mean?” She peered upon him bleary eyed, her resolve decaying with the passage of seconds. Kahlim took the opportunity as a means of resting his hands upon her shoulder, a reassuring warmth in the dismal cold of Hjil. “Daughter, vengeance and justice do not serve the same means. At what cost are you willing to pursue your goals? A thin veil protects you from mirroring that which you’ve hunted, when the time finally comes, will you tear that veil down?”
S’hala reached up to her father in response, the two shared a moment’s embrace, as Kahlim spoke once more. “Come with me, S’hala. We will turn our backs to this madness, and live our lives in peace.”
“Father...” She echoed once more, as her tears became more prominent. “I despised myself for murdering, and now you have forced me to endure those emotions again.” Kahlim reacted in shock, tensing his body in an attempt to pull away from S’hala, but he was caught with the defenselessness of a fly in a spider’s snare. With one deft plunge, S’hala drove the knife she had been holding deep into Kahlim’s back, wrenching the macabre puppet of her father from life like a common thug, and when the deed was done, flipping the carcass aside with brutish severity.
Conjuring the little mana she could soak from Hjil, S’hala destroyed Kahlim’s body, razing it into nothingness so that it would no longer serve a pernicious purpose. As her heart twisted and coiled, she set about destroying Hjil and ‘walking away once more.
---
She ignored her father's voice voice. Another act of treachery on his part. Instead she found her indolence dissipating, with a renewed vigor, she began climbing once more. With each step an incumbent memory was replayed for her, as though the trek was nothing more than a sojourn through history.
Each memory was perfectly orchestrated to reflect her actions. Like a judge reciting a list of convictions, she saw herself in the throes of “crime”.
Higher and higher, she climbed. Small objects littered from the Heavens, first hundreds, then thousands, then millions, then billions. It took only a brief glance to see that they were skulls, symbols of the dead. They piled so high that they reached S’hala on her platform, large monoliths of death. Each one recanted their name, their life, their being to her, and in turn screeched condemnations so loud that no powers above could drown them out.
S’hala was sprinting across the platforms now, leaping and flying as she tried to escape the infinite rain of remains.
She had vaulted herself one last time over the top of a boulder’s edge. The storm of skulls had subsided near instantly, in the place of a sky, once glance upon the boulder and she realized the world around them had been eclipsed by blankets of night, darkness, only illuminated by a singular light hovering in the center of this makeshift room.
Welcome. His voice was no longer bellowing, instead it seeped into the room like mist, bouncing off of walls of nothingness.
“Cast aside your cloak.” S’hala demanded.
I am revealed, can you not see me? The light in the room intensified, highlighting the only object present, a gilded throne forged of bone and earth. However it was empty, no shape or form made present.
S’hala... He hummed, inciting her name for the first time she could think of. I am wearied, weak, absolved of life because of you. Yet in that respect I may owe you my gratitude, for you have come to remove me from my shell, have you not? To purge the worlds of me, as would one a disease? I welcome it now.”
“What deceptions do you unfurl now?” She demanded, stepping towards the throne, blade in hand.
My sovereignty is extinguished. I do not hold nearly enough life to maintain what is left. If such is what you wish, then take it away. Loosen my reign and banish me. In the ages since we have first met, your actions have indicated your strength, and I, I am unfit if I cannot control my bearings anymore.
“You are committed? I will remove you from existence, extinguish any trace of you.” Another step forward, unseen magnetism welled inside S’hala.
Yes, child. Yours is a seed who has blossomed into something beyond what you once thought capable. I am in no position to deny that anymore.
“Yes...” She nodded, at the base of this ornate throne.
I must relinquish the remainder of my possessions to you, other worlds I have taken. Grant them mercy, as you are so inclined.
S’hala’s blade fell from her palm, she slowly caressed the surface of the throne, sinking her hands around its emanating power. “These worlds...you entrust them to me now?”
See them as I do.
She placed herself upon the throne. An enveloping high permeated her body, tingling with sensations of knowledge unfathomable. That sensation suddenly became overwhelming, like a crashing riptide of thoughts erupting like pustules, piercing her own consciousness and drowning her mind in suffocating drones. She was wracked with inscrutable mental asphyxiation. In the back of her head, his voice snuck in, engraving in her cerebrum the last cognizant thoughts she would know as S’hala, Assassin of Koromir.
[SSC XXII] Coronation
Spelling/Grammar: 9/10. Small oddities here and there. Also, 'affect' vs 'effect'. As well, some misuse of words. "Inciting", for example, does not fit the function for which it was used.
Characterization: 9/10. The characters seem to feel the odd need to wax poetic at times. This is especially evident in the conflict between S'hala and her unknown adversary. The opening section creates the sense of a long-held conflict between the two, with neither really bothering to waste words. Yet when they confront each other, both the adversary and S'hala seem to decide to use phrases like "wearied, weak, absolved of life" and "remove you from existence, extinguish any trace of you". Aside from that, good.
Plot: 10/10. Nicely done here.
Style: 8/10. The arrangement of the plot can be more than a bit confusing. A slightly more conventional plot arrangement might have served you better. As it is right now, it's not too apparent which time each part belongs to.
Prompt: 10/10. Two unique characters, one mental battle.
Apologies, the planeswalkers involved more represent the powers of oldwalkers, coupled with the humanization associated with the post-mending 'walkers. It's a little contradictory, but again, my apologies.
The idea behind the story was conceived in a manner similar to how the Weatherlight Saga began. Rather than formulate the story from the beginning, it starts in a relatively middle area chronologically, (as Weatherlight did with Rath and Storm). The conceptual idea behind this was that instead of providing the answers and lore in the story, inject brief instances of flavor that create a diversity and atmosphere that compels one to learn more about the setting, the characters, etc.
That being said, the "duel" in question is more cerebral than physical. The hope is that by minimizing the amount of characters and environments, the focus on the development of the antihero S'hala, and her unnamed antagonist, (consistently addressed by pronouns), come to the forefront.
The story jumps between past and present frequently, I hope I made this fluidly apparent.
Attempting to reduce these elements creates an odd, almost existentialist approach to Magic fiction, although still relatively enriched in high fantasy and by extension several mediocre tropes.
Anyway, sorry to bore you, enjoy the story (hopefully).
Assassin, why do you persist?
Another tremor; this one more recent than the last. S'hala made note of the unsettling frequency of each upheaval, it meant she was close.
Assassin, he called her; a moniker she had both defied and embraced. S'hala had long since cast off her cloak of altruism, though deep within she yearned for the sense of honor and morality she had once seen as her security against malevolence.
Your naivete blinded you. I have given you sight.
Again the shifting earth echoed his damning voice, deep unfathomable condemnations which danced across the desolate crags.
Sight? S'hala hissed, her own thoughts seethed with blood. Better to be blind than to see as you do.
Her derision was met with silence. It was time for her to move again.
This had to be the end. This plane was barren, devoid of life and barely sustaining the blackness that had consumed the other worlds. That same blackness that tainted S'hala with each new domain of his she visited.
You become more like me with each passing world, Assassin.
I share no kin with snakes and vermin, as you do.
Your memory forsakes you, planeswalker. Do you forget Koromir so readily?
Koromir. To S'hala, it was an uninterrupted respite of true beauty. A world of unerring grace unshadowed by malice. Bounty and blessing little mattered above Koromir's greatest value to her, it was her home. From the moment her eyes first opened, witnessing the benevolent scatter of skies, to her crowning ceremony as heir to her nation. A year's life in Koromir was worth a thousand in turbulence, and S'hala would have gladly traded one for the other.
S'hala had no idea that her peace and tranquility was on the cusp of turmoil. Koromir was changing, it apparently had been changing for centuries. The subtlest of touches had been gradually shifting the tides of power. Like sand gracefully beckoning beneath the fingers, the people of Koromir shifted; a veil of sanctity woven before their eyes. S'hala, like her forebears, lived in the bliss of ignorance.
He took that veil away. Ripped the wool from their eyes like it was nothing, and in the place of peace, conflict arose. The manipulations of a greater power incited war. S'hala did not know how, and never believed she would know how he managed to turn Koromir from a place of order into bedlam. Her people succumbed to battle, crumbling nations like dominos. Pennons lowered and swords raised, Koromir turned on itself.
A world at war became one without reason. When all had lost the will to think, he descended. It made sense, why work when you could have others do it for you? His beast-like omniscience cowed Koromir into submission. The cowards submitted their crowns in his power, tearing the once strong bonds between brethren. Without the unity to strike back Koromir capitulated nation by nation. Some became slaves and others sacrificed.
For what? A generator? My world, my people, subjugated to be his thralls. Why? To no grand ignoble scheme, but as fuel. We were once a proud people, and he made us coal.
You are as much my child as you were Koromir's, Assassin. Am I not as benevolent as any father? Am I not so kind as to give you the gifts no others can give? Yet how do you repay me? You sever my tongue, break my limbs and bind me. But still I love you so, come, come so that I might see you again once more.
He beckoned her calmly. Never since they had first met had he ever raised ire against her. Instead his voice was always calm, a subtle venom that wormed its way into the nerves. But still I love you... Yes, he shared their relationship as a father to a daughter, coiling his words so that their tumultuous war was nothing more than the petulance of rearing a child. The analogy wasn't lost on S'hala. With each world she visited of his, she learned something new about herself. His will was a skeleton key, gradually unlocking the paths in her mind which may have well been better off locked.
Years passed on Koromir where S'hala had no longer seen the light of day. Madness bled into her mind, shifting from order into chaos. The root of her inner conflict centralized on the umbilical cord that siphoned life from Koromir; the generator.
Under the guise of freedom, S’hala rallied the Korrin people to her cause, masking her intent from those whom she had entrusted her idealism.
Koromir stood no chance of overcoming their enigmatic dictator, she believed. Instead, they faced a slow suicide that would effect generations well beyond S’hala’s own.
The climax of her plans came in the form of a grandiose assault on the generator. While the Korrins dealt with the occupying oppressors, she stole away under the cloak of battle into the inner core. Confronted with this grand nexus of mana, all her anger and malice propagated a rage unmatched, the culmination of hatred unleashed a devastating spell that would rupture the core and ultimately decimate Koromir in a heap of uncontrolled mana.
In the ensuing devastation, her manifested hate sparked a destiny far greater, moments before the blanket of destruction would consume her and Koromir, a trigger executed the inner artifice of her soul; the blinding light of judgment disappeared, and S’hala ceased to exist on Koromir.
She was cast wayward into an infinite Æther, storms of nothingness cascaded into the ethereal. In the realm of eternity, the two of them passed one another. She, a lost satellite drifting into the empyrean, him, a hoarding miser scampering to see what had become of his treasure. Though the moment in which they collided could only have been fractions of a second, in that time both beings divined the essences of each other. A bond had been formed, an inescapable tether that could have only cultivated in calamity.
S’hala had crash-landed in a foreign plane far from the once bountiful fields of Koromir. Though it was alien in all respects, she found her ignorance banished from the corners of her mind. Every race, every fauna, all the minutest details had been privy to her through him. Yet with all of its grace and elegance afforded through that knowledge, she could only see one thing.
This world belonged to him.
His taint lingered, grafted malice that somehow sunk into the nerves of a serene, tranquil world. That was too much for S’hala. She knew what she was capable of doing now, that death was preferable than the life he had stored for them.
So began her vendetta. Sewn with seeds perdition, she cultivated her newfound powers for the purpose of ending his cross-planar tyranny, destroying each subsequent world that he’d taken as his own.
He adopted the moniker “Assassin”, chiding her acts of mass genocide with benevolent reproach. Where, he reminded her, was S’hala’s moral foundry? The catharsis of justice? The ideals of reason or duty?
They did not disappear, S’hala started. Only evolved.
S’hala dismantled him with the precision of a surgeon. In the beginning he had sought to rebuke her hatred and focused his machinations towards stopping her march of bedlam. Such actions proved folly, their chance encounter endowed her with the weapons from which she could destroy him, the incalculable power of knowledge. S’hala chased him into his deep corner of the multiverse, ‘walking across time and space to confront his presence and eradicate it.
The wisdom she gained developed into omniscience. Each plane she excised granted her gifts of power, harvesting a desire to ultimately subjugate him as he had once did her. She would not merely destroy him, she thought, but reduce him into nothingness, grind his being into a powder of ashes.
The world she now inhabited no longer bore titles. Like the antechamber of some primeval king, it carried no evidence of ever occupying life. Rather, he had hollowed out the world in the fashion of some make-shift office. S’hala saw it differently. She had ensured that this world would no longer serve the clerical; it would be his coffin.
This world had been reforged from the raw earth, taking the sea and stone and converging them with an architect’s careful conciseness. Floating spires of rock created make-shift stairways, ascending higher and higher into the blood-stained heavens.
Since she had arrived, he made punctual visits to her person, his invasive presence arriving in the form of an unseen voice accompanied by a bellowing tremor.
Sometimes their conversations ended almost amicably, a recollection of their eternal conflict. More often, S’hala unleashed wave after wave of vitriol, the building pleasure in ending him boiling like a kettle.
As she camped in the cusp of one of the floating rocks, a faint voice lingered on the wind.
Turn back, my child. Please, set aside your condemnation and let your better judgment guide you to safer sanctums.
The voice was not his. No, S’hala was stunned to hear such familiar emanations, as she knew the man who spoke to her now was once her father. Once. In the final days of Koromir, S’hala’s father Kahlim had stood beside her as one of the greatest advocates for rebellion. She had used her father’s great charisma to reunite her people into ultimately fulfilling her plan to end their suffering. When her spark ignited, she had believed Kahlim to have fallen along with the rest of Koromir; incinerated into nothingness.
But as S’hala had learned the inner complexities of her tormentor, so too did he in that split-second of conjoining, know everything about S’hala’s existence.
In a bid to stop S’hala’s rampaging trail of destruction, he conceived an agent of his own. On the rime-bitten world of Hjil, S’hala was confronted by the form of her father.
Not unlike now, he spoke to S’hala with the caring grace only afforded by a parent.
“S’hala, my child. What have you become..?”
His words cowed her. Unable to admonish this macabre puppetry she fell upon her knees in the blistering snow, weakened and wearied as almost a millennia of fighting caught up with her. “Father..” she whispered, the remnants of her conscience struck her with the precision of an arrow. “Am I not what Koromir has taught me? Do I somehow forsake our creed of justice?”
Kahlim approached his grieving daughter. “You act in the cause of justice, but as I have perceived, you are naught but a blade that cannot choose its path.”
“How do you mean?” She peered upon him bleary eyed, her resolve decaying with the passage of seconds. Kahlim took the opportunity as a means of resting his hands upon her shoulder, a reassuring warmth in the dismal cold of Hjil. “Daughter, vengeance and justice do not serve the same means. At what cost are you willing to pursue your goals? A thin veil protects you from mirroring that which you’ve hunted, when the time finally comes, will you tear that veil down?”
S’hala reached up to her father in response, the two shared a moment’s embrace, as Kahlim spoke once more. “Come with me, S’hala. We will turn our backs to this madness, and live our lives in peace.”
“Father...” She echoed once more, as her tears became more prominent. “I despised myself for murdering, and now you have forced me to endure those emotions again.” Kahlim reacted in shock, tensing his body in an attempt to pull away from S’hala, but he was caught with the defenselessness of a fly in a spider’s snare. With one deft plunge, S’hala drove the knife she had been holding deep into Kahlim’s back, wrenching the macabre puppet of her father from life like a common thug, and when the deed was done, flipping the carcass aside with brutish severity.
Conjuring the little mana she could soak from Hjil, S’hala destroyed Kahlim’s body, razing it into nothingness so that it would no longer serve a pernicious purpose. As her heart twisted and coiled, she set about destroying Hjil and ‘walking away once more.
She ignored her father's voice voice. Another act of treachery on his part. Instead she found her indolence dissipating, with a renewed vigor, she began climbing once more. With each step an incumbent memory was replayed for her, as though the trek was nothing more than a sojourn through history.
Each memory was perfectly orchestrated to reflect her actions. Like a judge reciting a list of convictions, she saw herself in the throes of “crime”.
Higher and higher, she climbed. Small objects littered from the Heavens, first hundreds, then thousands, then millions, then billions. It took only a brief glance to see that they were skulls, symbols of the dead. They piled so high that they reached S’hala on her platform, large monoliths of death. Each one recanted their name, their life, their being to her, and in turn screeched condemnations so loud that no powers above could drown them out.
S’hala was sprinting across the platforms now, leaping and flying as she tried to escape the infinite rain of remains.
She had vaulted herself one last time over the top of a boulder’s edge. The storm of skulls had subsided near instantly, in the place of a sky, once glance upon the boulder and she realized the world around them had been eclipsed by blankets of night, darkness, only illuminated by a singular light hovering in the center of this makeshift room.
Welcome. His voice was no longer bellowing, instead it seeped into the room like mist, bouncing off of walls of nothingness.
“Cast aside your cloak.” S’hala demanded.
I am revealed, can you not see me? The light in the room intensified, highlighting the only object present, a gilded throne forged of bone and earth. However it was empty, no shape or form made present.
S’hala... He hummed, inciting her name for the first time she could think of. I am wearied, weak, absolved of life because of you. Yet in that respect I may owe you my gratitude, for you have come to remove me from my shell, have you not? To purge the worlds of me, as would one a disease? I welcome it now.”
“What deceptions do you unfurl now?” She demanded, stepping towards the throne, blade in hand.
My sovereignty is extinguished. I do not hold nearly enough life to maintain what is left. If such is what you wish, then take it away. Loosen my reign and banish me. In the ages since we have first met, your actions have indicated your strength, and I, I am unfit if I cannot control my bearings anymore.
“You are committed? I will remove you from existence, extinguish any trace of you.” Another step forward, unseen magnetism welled inside S’hala.
Yes, child. Yours is a seed who has blossomed into something beyond what you once thought capable. I am in no position to deny that anymore.
“Yes...” She nodded, at the base of this ornate throne.
I must relinquish the remainder of my possessions to you, other worlds I have taken. Grant them mercy, as you are so inclined.
S’hala’s blade fell from her palm, she slowly caressed the surface of the throne, sinking her hands around its emanating power. “These worlds...you entrust them to me now?”
See them as I do.
She placed herself upon the throne. An enveloping high permeated her body, tingling with sensations of knowledge unfathomable. That sensation suddenly became overwhelming, like a crashing riptide of thoughts erupting like pustules, piercing her own consciousness and drowning her mind in suffocating drones. She was wracked with inscrutable mental asphyxiation. In the back of her head, his voice snuck in, engraving in her cerebrum the last cognizant thoughts she would know as S’hala, Assassin of Koromir.
I win.
Spelling/Grammar: 9/10. Small oddities here and there. Also, 'affect' vs 'effect'. As well, some misuse of words. "Inciting", for example, does not fit the function for which it was used.
Characterization: 9/10. The characters seem to feel the odd need to wax poetic at times. This is especially evident in the conflict between S'hala and her unknown adversary. The opening section creates the sense of a long-held conflict between the two, with neither really bothering to waste words. Yet when they confront each other, both the adversary and S'hala seem to decide to use phrases like "wearied, weak, absolved of life" and "remove you from existence, extinguish any trace of you". Aside from that, good.
Plot: 10/10. Nicely done here.
Style: 8/10. The arrangement of the plot can be more than a bit confusing. A slightly more conventional plot arrangement might have served you better. As it is right now, it's not too apparent which time each part belongs to.
Prompt: 10/10. Two unique characters, one mental battle.