Chapter Text
Your chest hurts. It feels like someone took one of your knitting needles and ran you through, except instead of blood, you’re leaking black ooze. You can hear John calling your name faintly in the background, but the rushing of your black blood in your ears drowns him out. When you open your mouth, the only thing that comes out is a low moan and another spurt of oily goo. It falls onto your shoes, coating your already bloodstained footwear with even more grime.
‘That will be hard to clean up later’, you think abstractly, in a manner that tells you that you’re probably going into shock. For some reason, this is the most important thought in your head even though your mother’s corpse is lying not three feet from you and you have recently absorbed the dark magicks of the ancient deities in the Furthest Ring.
The clouds above you rumble, and you see the coiling tendrils of your dark aura swirl aimlessly in the air behind you. Something, no someone, is coming. Jack Noir.
He’s walking toward you, green lightning crackling around his chest and the stump of his arm. You glance at John and try to warn him, but he’s still staring at the bodies on the ground in front of him. Anyways, it’s not like he’d understand the eldritch festertongue that was coming out of you. You draw your needles. Nobody else is dying today. You sense John pulling out his warhammer behind you, and you go to give him a reassuring smile but instead you see Noir materialize behind him.
The sword goes straight through John’s chest, poking out the front as a massive bloodstain appears on the front of his god tier pjs. You scream, all your rage and anguish cramming into one long wail. You forget that you are certainly no match for Noir and that if you grab John’s body and run he’ll revive soon anyways because there was no way that death was just or heroic. You forget everything except the voices of the elder gods in your heads, the deafening murmurs of deities long forgotten by humanity. All that remains is rage and pain. You lunge for Noir’s throat.
He blocks your needles with the sword previously buried in his chest. You don’t slow down for a second. You wouldn’t dare. Unlike John, you aren’t immortal. Noir slashes at your chest. You parry and return the hit, forcing him off the floating chunk of the Battlefield and into the air. Your tentacled aura propels you after him as you launch a crackling ray of pure white light at his chest.
It bounces off. Noir had constructed some kind of barrier around himself that deflected your magick. You’re on defense now, barely dodging his swipes while dancing through the thorny whips of your uncontrollable power. He vanishes, reappearing behind you to ram you back down to the rock where John’s body is lying motionless. You fall, screaming curses in long forgotten languages. You slam into the ground, coughing up blood. Surprisingly it’s still red. You suppose you were being a little dramatic earlier when you assumed your blood had changed with the rest of you. You briefly wondered what the ooze that was inside your body was, before forcing your thoughts back to the battle at hand.
Noir swings his sword again, jarring the needles in you hands and knocking them out of your grip. You cry out, stretching your limbs out to try and catch them. Before you even get close to them you feel an even greater pain in your chest.
You look down. The sword previously buried in Jack Noir’s chest is now sticking out of yours. You gasp, breath rattling in your throat and only barely escaping your parted lips. Black and red combine on the ground beside you as Noir yanks his sword from your body only to stab you again in the side. You cough more blood and your vision blurs. You get a glimpse of Noir flashing green and teleporting elsewhere, but you are unable to move to stop him.
Your vision is tunneling now, unconsciousness is quickly approaching and after that, death. You can feel the dark magicks draining from your body, returning to the void.
You’re scared. You suddenly realize that, like most people, you don’t want to die. You also kind of want your mom. She may have been passive-aggressive as all get out but she still gave the kind of hugs that made you feel like you could just melt into her embrace.
You’re struggling to breath now, air bubbling inside your lungs. Noir must have punctured one with that first stab.
‘Dying is slower than I thought it would be.’, you think to yourself as everything fades away.