Summoning Soularous

Joint Post with Ender

((Heiligtum, Varland))

Aldous watched as the wizard left. He heaved a sigh of relief but then heard his brother in his ear again. Calling out to be summoned to the mortal plane. Aldous closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “If it's not one thing it's another,” he hissed under his breath. Rolling his shoulders, he made arcane gestures in the air with his cloth-wrapped hands. Soon a series of fine silver and gold circles of intricate runic incantations floated in space before him.

“Brother, if you can hear me, help me enter the mortal world, please,” Soularous pleaded.

Aldous’ eyes turned a glowing light blue, “You’ve contacted me at a very inopportune time, Soul,” he said speaking to the air. “I have things I need to take care of, then we can have a chat about whatever this is you are bothering me with...”

“Gelt hurt my son, and Incarious is about to--”

“Just wait,” Aldous said, cutting his sibling off. He stepped from the main room to see Aggie standing in the hall still pondering Enanth's visit. “You and I need to take care of a few things,” he told her, not sternly, but in a way that denoted concern and the need for haste.

Once again unlocking the arcane runes protecting her father's lab, they made their way back inside. “Aggie be a dear and help me with this spell,” he requested, gesturing for her to come off the last step. “We first need to cast a mass mending spell on this room. Remove all the dangerous text from the walls your father scrawled in his madness. It is not safe to allow it to stay here. Especially if your fathers ‘friend’ is choosing to poke around. Enanth knows enough that he could be a problem.”

“Isn’t that destroying evidence?” Aggie asked him.

“Well in a certain respect yes, but this magic is... its barely magic really.” Aldous started, he tilted his head thinking. “It’s like…” he paused. “You know how most necromancers are evil? Well this is magic evil enough even most of them would never even consider messing with it. Like what the monsters that go bump in the night would fear deeper in the dark. This stuff was meant to be destroyed, even the Devil Monarchs of the Nine Hells don’t mess with it. It can’t exist. Or at least it shouldn't,” Aldous finished, seeing Aggie was still a bit puzzled.

“You said no one can read it but you and a small handful of others though, didn’t you?” Aggie asked.

“Yeah, but....” he tried thinking again, “Sweaters… It’s detailed and you can make them from all kinds of furs and fabric, but it's like one thread. If you pull it or snag it, it all comes apart. Unravels. This magic can do that. It would give people power they are not meant to have. Doing what your father looks like he was planning to do makes it unlife. Not undead like a zombie, or a walking skeleton. But something that is what it is at the time it ‘dies’ forever. All time for it stops. Yeah, it’s hard to explain; even I don’t fully understand it all. I was never taught about it. It's a taboo subject even for beings like me.” Aldous seemed deeply concerned in a way Aggie had never seen him.

“We can talk about it more later,” he told her. “Okay, now follow my lead.”

Aldous started the mending incantation and Aggie followed his moves. They were not the kind of magic she was used to. Not like what she was trained at Miekrannis College. It felt strange, the same circles appeared before her as did Aldous. As they continued to shape the arcane weave before them the writing on every surface started to fade like waves taking away writing in the sand.

Once everything had vanished, Aldous asked Aggie to step to the bottom most step. “We won’t be coming down here again for a while,” he told her, “I am setting up new protections.” Aldous went about enacting more powerful wards that kept out scrying, and any form of visual spying as well as taking away any ability to just warp in. Making the small basement space of the lab absolutely impenetrable, even more than her father had.

---

A short while after returning to the main room, Aldous took two glasses off the mantel and his bottle of booze. “Aggie, please wait inside. I have something I need to attend to. Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to be here for this,” he said at the last minute, getting a can of salt.

She made as if to protest but then finally did as he asked, the trauma of the day catching up on her, making her more biddable. Thankfully. Aldous did not want her to meet Soularous. Not stupid, he made a circle of salt around the summoning rune. Making it in a way to force his brother to speak to him before he was allowed to go off gallivanting on some ‘noble’ crusade against a ‘rogue’ angel. Aldous knew who Incarious was and his brother’s enmity towards the angelic being. Unlike most, he was also aware of Gelt's existence.

Circles of purple and black glyphs crackled and fizzled as if they were trying to extinguish themselves even as Aldous made them, gritting his teeth and pushing back against the world and the weave that was trying to stop him from bending the laws of the universe and magic to suit his will. Putting his fingers through nothingness in space, he started to pull reality apart on itself, and in a flashing wave of bright heat in the circle there suddenly stood Soularous. Aldous’ hand wraps vaporized and hands and arms had light wisps of smoke rolling off them, like steam off a body moving from a hot bath to a cold room. Aldous knew what he had just done would be felt by anyone with any significant connection to the Weave, but it could not be helped.

Shaking off the remnants of the wraps, Aldous looked at the man before him. “Care for a drink?”

Soularous looked around, he looked down at the salt, "I figured this was going to happen, sure. A drink would be nice." He sat down on the ground, his presence being suppressed by the wards. "Aldous, I would like to be on the move, but you have questions. So go ahead and ask them."

Aldous shook his head, “No. Not questions, suggestions. You need to give up this child’s fantasy of being a god. You don’t have the blood for it. Godhood will treat you like a mere fire log. Burn you out till there is nothing left. But if you must fight this...angel was it? I act as a sort of referee and take you two to an empty pocket plane to fight, if you truly want to be a god. You need to understand what life means, and a fight like what you seem to be so hard for, will kill millions, and I personally won’t let that happen. So you can have your fight, you can go with zero rules, aside from my one. You both fight on my terms. I summoned you, after all. So do we have an agreement?”

Soularous groaned, "This again. Aldous, you say I do not have the blood, yet the blood of the White King runs through me, even if it isn't much compared to the other gods, it's enough for me to get a grip. I won't stop my goal, however. I do not wish to harm the innocent. When the time comes, I will go by your terms. I doubt that feathered prick will come down anytime soon. We have an agreement there, but I have other matters to deal with, such as Gelt. Or Draken, the Crimson Leech has been sucking the life out of this world and has harmed my son, your nephew. Draken's blood has truly awakened, meaning there is a good chance he will have more than just mortals following him." Soularous got up, "I need to act. To show this world I'm not a threat, that I'm here to help. I will uphold the agreement, brother." The demon lord stuck out his hand to shake his brother's.

Aldous pinched the bridge of his nose once more. “You really need to listen just one time to me. Just once. Can you do that?” he began. “I’m not going to make the case for dashing your dreams against the rocks again for now. I just need you to understand something. You can’t just go taking one all challengers without thinking things through first,” he went on, “Close your eyes a moment, take a deep breath. You feel that?” Aldous asked. “You go on and on about not feeling the gods around us, but when I focus on the world around us I feel less and less of our family out there. I haven’t spoken to Jynieth in a very long time, or any of the rest of our family. Not for lack of trying. Maybe for just a short time your focus should be with me, and her, here and now. Fix the issues our kind face before you go and risk getting captured and sealed away or worse trying to get revenge on a force you’ve not even looked into yet.” Aldous raised his hand to meet his brothers. “But, for now. You have a deal, and now that I am free of my master. I will accompany you and lend you my aid.” Aldous shook his brother's hand. Making the deal and burning a seal into the palm. “But you follow my rules, okay?”