Selene…
As she and Thalia were watching the match between Marcus and Raime play out, she noticed something wrong about his reaction to the flames of madness.
Thalia also seemed to notice as she said, “W-What’s going on with him? He seems different.”
“How do you mean?” Selene asked as she tried to pretend nothing was wrong, though she already knew the answer.
“Isn’t his magic supposed to be blue? Not just that but...he was screaming from those flames and now he’s acting weird. Something about his face…makes him look like a different person,” she said nervously.
Selene decided not to mention what she knew about Ender and said, “I’m sure he’ll be alright. Marcus will figure out a way to win and come out of it just fine.”
As much as she wanted to believe that was true, she was concerned about what kind of being Ender really was and what he was going to do now that he was in control.
Frosk…
He and Azazel had been watching Marcus’s fight very closely up until the point where his lightning changed color from blue to red and his demeanor changed as well.
“Hold on! Marcus has the Scarlet Bolt as well? Since when?!” he exclaimed as he turned to Azazel expecting him to answer.
“In his case, it is a bit more complicated,” he said, somewhat dodging the question.
“Is Marcus the third king?”
“No, Marcus is not the third king,” he said as he shook his head as he held his chin in his hand while he thought.
“Then how does he have the power of the scarlet bolt? He only arrived in this world very recently correct? He doesn’t have any Forrosan lineage, does he?”
Azazel then held up his hand and said, “Frosk, when you manifest the scarlet bolt into reality, do you feel that power coming from you, or going through you?”
“I…I don’t follow.”
“When you use your shadow magic, that power is something that comes from you, from your own soul. However, when you manifest the scarlet bolt, even though your soul has been directly affected by it, its power does not come from you, it is manifested through you. You have a connection to the god of wrath as a result of being struck by its bolt, but you are not the source of that power, merely a conduit.”
Frosk took a moment to process that and nodded as it made sense before replying, “I understand, but If he is not the third king and he wasn’t struck by the scarlet bolt, nor does he have Forrosan lineage, then how does he have that power?”
“Can you feel a difference from here, in how the power is being manifested by Marcus?”
Frosk turned his head suddenly to stare at Azazel for a moment, wondering what he could be alluding to, before he focused his senses on Marcus to try and gauge the differences.
As Marcus stood, with red lightning all around his body, Frosk closes his eyes and sensed that the way the power flowed felt very familiar.
“It feels just like that woman Artemis’s power whenever she manifests the moon in battle. The power would radiate from her rather than through her, and Marcus is doing the same. Does that mean-”
Azazel held up his hands and said, “Enough. Keep those thoughts to yourself for now and watch how things play out.”
Moyako…
After having a quick snack and finishing their discussion at Boggart’s diner, they returned to the arena to watch the final match of the day between Marcus and Raime.
Surprisingly, Camilla decided to join her while Raum stayed behind.
While they were about to rejoin the rest of the audience, Camilla asked, “I don’t want you to feel the wrong way about this when I ask, but what is it about Marcus that is so important to your family that you would wait two hundred years just to meet him? Is he really strong? Is he some big political figure in your world? What is it?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Moyako said flatly but Camilla didn’t want to give up on the topic.
“Why not? If he’s been your entire reason for why you came to this world in the first place and you’ve been silently obsessing over it this whole time, now that you’ve found him, why stay silent over it now?”
“Please, just stop talking about it,” she said, mildly irritated.
Camilla then folded her arms and frowned as she said, “Fine, but one of these days you are going to give me a proper explanation.”
As the two rejoined the audience and laid eyes on the fight taking place, Moyako felt suddenly disturbed by how Marcus appeared to be acting.
Something about the way his magic felt was very different from how it was when she had met him before. It felt crueler, more violent, and so uncaring.
“Something is wrong with him,” she said to herself while Camilla stared at her in confusion.
“Well obviously. Right now he’s being driven insane by Raime’s flames-”
“No, not that. Whatever is going on with him, whatever that…thing is, its not Marcus. There is no way that that is the same person.”
Camilla looked at her doubtfully as she said, “Are you sure? Because before I fought Frosk, Marcus approached me in the hallway before forcing an overwhelming amount of knowledge into my head. When he did, his presence felt exactly the same way then as it does now.”
Moyako turned her head suddenly to stare at Camilla as she said, “You spoke with Marcus? You met him in person?”
“W-Well, speaking with him is saying a bit much. Its more that he appeared, tapped me on the head, and then someone else showed up and told me to go away,” she said, which left Moyako feeling even more confused than ever.
If this ‘thing’ and Marcus are the same being, then what else does she not know about him?
Raime…
He stared down at the man who had cut off his arm and wondered how he could withstand his flames of madness to be able to stand and fight once again.
“How are you still sane?” Raime asked him, ignoring the blood seeping from his wound.
Marcus, or whatever force was now inhabiting his body, smiled and said, “He’s not. Marcus is still struggling to fight through the insanity you’ve put him through. Until he recovers, you are dealing with me now.”
The voice this man spoke with was sharper and its attitude was much harsher.
Raime raised his eyebrows curiously and asked, “If you are no longer than man I was fighting before, then who are you now?”
“You may refer to me as Ender.”
Raime did nothing but stare at this man as he tried to understand the sudden change in his personality and the feel of his soul.
Seemingly understanding his confusion, Ender took no immediate action either, which led to both men staring at one another until an answer could be found.
Raime frowned as he felt something eerily familiar, yet different about how Marcus’s soul felt while Ender was in control of him. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but he knew that he had sensed such power once before, a long time ago.
“Now that I know your name, I only have one more question to ask before we resume our battle,” he said plainly.
“Speak.”
“Your presence feels familiar, but I do not recognize your existence. What are you?”
Hearing his question, Ender’s face fell with disappointment as he asked, “Do your eyes fail you so that you cannot recognize the appearance of your god?”
Raime’s eyes flared with indignation as he replied, “What did you say to me?”
“Are your ears failing as well? Do not make me repeat myself.”
“UTTER NONSENSE!” Raime roared as he pulled back his left arm cut Ender down only to have the other arm severed before it could reach its target.
Ender waved his hand and dozens of chains erupted from the ground with hooks attacked to the ends as they pierced through Raime’s flesh and held him in place.
“What a fool you are Raime, to deny that I am not your god. No, you are an even greater fool for calling yourself a god when you are not,” Ender said, with his voice becoming deeper and crueler the more he spoke.
“What delusions are you prattling on about?!” Raime shouted as he struggled to free himself from the chains. His feet, legs, arms, and all across his chest had been pierced by the cruel hooks as they kept him from moving any closer to Ender.
Yet as painful as the hooks were, to hear this man blaspheme himself as Raime’s god filled him with a sense of disgust and rage he had not felt in many years.
“The true delusion is that you claim yourself as the God of Madness, but in reality, you are nothing more than the bastard Dragon Kin child of a chaos witch whore and a father who I’ve consumed,” Ender said, with venom dripping from every word.
“H-How could you know of such things?” he hissed back.
Ender sighed impatiently as he said, “Perhaps I need to raise my voice if I want to be heard…”
As he looked down at this man, bathed in his flames of madness, he felt an enormous pressure fall upon him as the sky suddenly took on a red hue.
The pressure then became so intense that he could no longer stand as he fell to his knees and had to prop himself with the stumps left from his arms.
It took all his strength just to raise his head as Ender looked down on him and said, “Now that you prostrate yourself, you will listen carefully so that my words do not fall on deaf ears.”
In the blink of an eye, the gravity all around them intensified so greatly that even the light began to bend, dragged down by Ender’s overwhelming presence.
He lowered his head to look Raime in the eyes, and when he opened his mouth, the words that followed were deafening, like an otherworldly cacophony of thunder.
“GROVEL AT MY FEET AND RECOGNIZE THE FIGURE THAT YOU WORSHIP, FOR I AM YOUR GOD! HEAR MY NAME, ______!”
Refusing to accept his words, Raime dug deep into his soul and struggled back onto his feet, even through the oppressive force of Ender’s power that tried to keep him on his knees.
Once he found himself standing firm once again, Raime roared back, “I REJECT ALL THAT YOU ARE! I TAKE ONLY ONE MAN AS GOD, DAGON, THE GOD KING OF BLOOD! YOU ARE NOT HE!”
Ender looked at him with an expression of utmost disappointment, thoroughly unimpressed by his display of loyalty to Dagon.
“You still worship a god that has long been dead, hoping to return to a bygone era, while the world changes all around you. You are not the God of Madness, Raime. You are a victim of it.”
“And you are a false god,” Raime said defiantly.
“False?” he chuckled, which then turned to uncontrollable laughter.
Raime wondered if Ender himself had finally gone insane from the flames.
When he finally calmed himself down from his laughing fit, his expression became deathly serious once more as he said, “I will show you the majesty of a god’s true strength.”
His left hand tightened its grip on Light Taker as he looked up at the moon orbiting the world within the battlefield.
With his right arm, he reached to the sky, and his fingers clenched around the air as if he were gripping the moon itself.
Ender grunted with effort but smiled as he turned his head and looked Raime in the eyes once more before saying, “Bear witness to my strength, for I will pull the moon from its orbit and crash it into this world!”
The false god of madness watched, chained and unable to escape or fight back, as the moon that appeared so far away, grew closer with every passing moment until no patch of sky was not swallowed up in its gargantuan size.