Chapter 128: Indecision

The path to the peak tried to kill Grace at least twelve times in the first five minutes.

First, a lightning bolt hit the rock face inches from her head. The thunder came instantly, loud enough to make her teeth rattle and her ears ring like someone was playing drums inside her skull.

[Great start. Love this.]

Then the wind decided to get personal. It grabbed her wings like a drunk ex at a party and slammed her face-first into the mountainside. She scraped along jagged rocks, her robes tearing like tissue paper.

“Fuck!”

She pushed off and kept climbing.

Rain started pelting her from below. Not above, like normal rain that understood basic physics. Below. The droplets shot upward like tiny liquid bullets, each one stinging against her skin.

A mini-tornado made entirely of ice shards spun across the path ahead. Because regular tornadoes weren’t horrible enough, apparently. Grace dove to avoid it. The thing actually changed direction to chase her.

“Are you kidding me?”

She scrambled along the path on hands and knees while the ice tornado pursued her for twenty yards before finally dissolving into snow.

[This is insane. This is actually insane.]

Higher up, the temperature dropped so fast her breath came out in clouds thick enough to obscure her vision.

Then, without warning, blazing heat.

Her frozen robes started steaming. The ice on the path turned to water so fast it created actual geysers. Grace’s skin felt like she’d stuck herself in an oven.

“What the heck—”

Back to cold. Arctic, bone-deep cold.

Then heat again.

“Make up your mind!” she shouted at the sky.

Time to keep moving.

The path narrowed until it was barely two feet wide. On her left, sheer rock face that went up forever. On her right, a drop into churning storm clouds that occasionally flashed colorfully.

Grace pressed herself against the rock and shuffled sideways.

Lightning struck the path directly ahead. The rock didn’t just crack—it exploded, sending chunks flying everywhere. One piece hit her shoulder hard enough to spin her around.

“Crap!”

She windmilled her arms, teetering on the edge. For a second, she stared down into the abyss of weird-colored clouds.

[Nope. Nope nope nope.]

Again, she considered just flying, but she felt that the instant she was in the air, she’d be at this Pillar’s mercy.

Instead, Grace threw herself forward, clearing the smoking crater the lightning had left. Made it by inches. Her feet scrambled for purchase on the far side while her hands clawed at loose rocks.

[Yes! I’m okay!]

More wind hit her. But this wind came from above, pressing down like an invisible giant trying to squash her flat. Grace dropped to her hands and knees, wings pressed so tight against her back they hurt.

She crawled forward, rocks digging into her palms. The pressure increased. Her arms shook with the effort of keeping herself up.

Then, suddenly, weightlessness.

A tornado had touched down directly on the path. But instead of throwing her off the mountain, it sucked her straight up. Grace screamed as the world spun into a gray-white blur.

[This is how I die. Dizzy and probably about to puke.]

The tornado spat her out fifty feet higher than where she’d started. She hit the path hard, rolling to absorb the impact. When she finally stopped, she was somehow closer to the peak.

It dissipated without acknowledgment.

[Well. That’s one way to climb.]

The peak loomed above now. Just bare rock surrounded by a perfect sphere of swirling clouds. Lightning crackled between the layers, creating a cage of electricity that pulsed with its own rhythm.

Beautiful, in a “definitely going to kill you” kind of way.

Grace reached the final stretch of path.

Grace remembered Eternia’s warning. The Tempest potentially knew she wasn’t her creator. But maybe, just maybe, pretending might buy her time to figure out the Pillar’s mood.

Or it might piss her off more.

[Only one way to find out. Time to act like a goddess. You’ve got this, Grace. Channel that big… deity energy.]

She stepped onto the peak proper. The storm sphere closed around her, cutting off the rest of the world. Inside, the air felt electric. Every hair on her body stood on end.

“Tempest!” Grace called out, trying to channel Eternia’s confidence. She threw her arms wide like she owned the place. “I’ve returned!”

The storms paused.

[Eh?]

Every single droplet of rain froze mid-air. Every snowflake stopped mid-fall. Even the lightning held still, crackling arcs suspended between clouds.

The silence was deafening.

Then the sky screamed.

Not thunder. Not wind. An actual scream that sounded like reality itself was having a breakdown.

A figure descended from above. Where the Root had been earthy and the Tide watery, where the Flame had been solid and burning, the Tempest never touched the ground. She floated twenty feet up, surrounded by a personal hurricane that whipped her form in and out of focus.

She looked like Eternia if someone had taken Eternia, put her in a blender with a tornado, and then tried to put her back together using only anger and bad decisions.

White hair whipped in every direction, defying gravity and common sense. Golden eyes flickered between colors—blue, green, red, purple, back to gold, sometimes all at once. Her body kept shifting between solid flesh and literal wind.

“You.” The word came out like breaking glass mixed with nails on a chalkboard. “You dare?”

The frozen weather resumed. All of it. At once. Rain from seven directions, snow from twelve, hail shaped like fists, lightning that seemed personally offended by Grace’s existence—everything hit her at the same time.

She threw herself sideways. A lightning bolt carved a trench where she’d been standing, the rock melting into glass from the heat.

“YOU DARE WEAR HER FACE?”

[Ah, crap. She knows.]

Grace dropped the act immediately. No point pretending when the jig was clearly up.

“Okay, I’m not—”

“I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!” The Tempest’s form scattered into wind, then reformed ten feet closer. “Her little replacement! Her backup plan! Her INSULT!”

“Look, I just want to talk—”

“Talk?” The Tempest laughed. “She sent you to TALK?”

“She didn’t send me. I came on my own.”

“LIAR!”

More lightning. Grace’s blade materialized just in time to deflect it. The impact still sent her sliding backward, her feet carving grooves in solid stone.

“Eternia pretends to be a dopey airhead but everything she does is planned! Calculated! Even abandoning us!” The Tempest spun in place, creating a vortex that sucked up loose rocks and what looked like a confused bird. “Especially abandoning us!”

“I’m seriously trying to help—”

“HELP?” The Tempest’s form solidified completely. She looked exactly like Eternia now, if Eternia had been fed nothing but rage and disappointment for millennia. “Like she helped by shoving her indecision into me? Her doubt? Her inability to commit to ANYTHING?”

The temperature dropped to absolute zero. Grace’s next breath came out as ice crystals.

Then it spiked to inferno levels. The ice crystals immediately became steam.

Then both. Then neither. Then something else entirely that made her skin feel inside-out.

“Do you know what it’s like?” The Tempest descended slightly, still floating but now close enough that Grace could see the madness swirling in her eyes. “To be made of questions with no answers? To never know what you want? What you are? What you’re supposed to be?”

“I—”

“OF COURSE YOU DON’T!”

Wind slammed into Grace. She hit a boulder hard enough to see stars, then slid down it to land on her butt.

“You’re her perfect little chosen one! Clear purpose! Clear path! Must be nice!”

Grace tried to stand. The wind shoved her down again, grinding her face into the dirt.

[Okay. Getting real tired of eating rocks.]

“I didn’t ask for this either—”

“But you got it anyway.” The Tempest’s voice went quiet. Which was somehow worse than the screaming. “Her favor. Her power. Her love.”

The storms calmed. Just for a moment. The eye of the hurricane.

“While we got her garbage.”

Then everything exploded again.

Wind shrieked. Lightning struck in bursts. The ground beneath Grace’s feet started to crack and shift like it was trying to buck her off the mountain entirely.

“I can’t decide if I want to kill you or keep you.” The Tempest tilted her head at an angle that heads shouldn’t tilt. “Both sound good. Or neither. Or something else entirely. Maybe I’ll turn you into weather. Would you like to be a nice drizzle? Or perhaps a hurricane?”

She raised her hand. The air around her fingers twisted into various odd shapes.

“Actually, you know what? I can’t decide. So I’ll let others do it for me.”

Wind coalesced into other shapes. Humanoid but wrong. Made of compressed air and fury, with suggestions of faces in their swirling forms. Eyes that were just gaps in the wind. Mouths that opened on nothing.

Five of them. Then ten. Then twenty. Then too many to count. All around level 40.

“Yes… These things are like me,” The Tempest smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. It was the kind of smile that made you regret being born. “They can’t decide what they are either. But they know they’re angry.”

The wind-creatures charged.

Grace raised her blade as the first one reached her, its wind-fist already swinging for her head.

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