“Elkay! Elkay! Need to speak to you right now!”
Elkay should have been annoyed at one of his fellow Twelve Anew interrupting his private times, doubly so since he’d informed them all that he was taking most of the weekend off, but, firstly, he was used to it, and, secondly the sheer panic in Kohra’s voice suggested something was very, very wrong.
“What is it, Kohra?”
“There’s Corruption! Here! It got in! I thought Kairos took care of the break-in Litty and I spotted! But he brought it into the universe! And I can’t track it! Because the universe is too warm!”
Kohra was shaking. He was genuinely scared.
“Where is Kairos right now?” Elkay asked. “And have you told the rest of the Twelve?”
“I told Dalosisaar, he, Litvir and Murum’Va are going to try and find Kairos and block his path. But he’s coming this way! To your library! And I don’t know why! I just know that I definitely spotted some Corruption somewhere in here!”
“In here?”
“In the library, somewhere!”
Elkay hesitated, not liking what Kohra was implying. “There is Corruption in my library?”
“Not… not like actual Corruption. Like… a… a beacon? Something that Kairos seems to want, that he needs for… I… I don’t know… Also he wants to kill you. Maybe… Maybe you are the thing Kairos wants? I… I… ” Kohra trailed off, shaking quite a bit.
After a brief moment of thought, Elkay glanced at the friends he had invited round for his little party, then sighed and tapped his wristband a few times. On the fourth tap, an alarm started to blare, signalling for everyone to start evacuating the library. The alarm was meant for fires, but Elkay did care, he just needed everyone gone.
From what he could tell, the alarms were doing their job and most folks seemed to be leaving, but just as Elkay was about to tell his friends to head off, everything began to shake.
“That… that doesn’t seem good…” Phiva, the old Ksithan lawyer Elkay had invited to his book party, grumbled.
“It’s a shame, honestly!” Thitaay tutted. “I was enjoying myself! Also, I’m just going to make this easy for you, Elkay, and have the shadowtouched folks here take us home.”
“Yes, please, do that!” Elkay exclaimed, pointing at the two Skyavok who could shadowjump. “You two, please, get Glaili and Phiva out of here. I’ll sort out Thitaay, and Mur’Emba and Relkir, I’ll get you both home in-”
The ground shook. Everything shook. A hideous voice rattled through the air, but, worryingly, Elkay didn’t understand what was being said at first.
Something shattered. The walls collapsed. The floor collapsed as well. Elkay found himself being grabbed and thrown through several other walls, and he was pretty sure Kohra had landed on top of him.
“Let me kill you and I will spare the universe.”
Elkay pushed Kohra off of him, then staggered to his feet. Standing in front of him was the Whenvern, but…
“You… you Corrupted yourself?” Elkay gasped.
“No, I am resurrecting a real Life Goddess, to make this universe better!” Kairos snarled. “Once you are dead, once Epani is dead, once I have smashed open that little jar Epani buried deep in your library, everything will be better.”
The Whenvern roared and prepared to charge, but a gust of wind redirected the blast of corrupted fire that Kairos had intended to spit at Elkay. Chains of fire, earth and gravity erupted from the found, trying to hold Kairos down, while blasts of water and light tried to blind Kairos’s senses, but he was desperately trying to shrug them off. The rest of the Twelve Anew had arrived to try and protect Elkay, but Kairos’s time powers were making things very difficult. One by one, each of the Twelve Anew would be thrown to one side, only for them to get back up and put themselves between Kairos and Elkay.
It was clear though that the Twelve Anew were struggling. Even Nanik was here, in person, trying to help, and she had already been hurt. But Maresia and Syksis were trying to keep everyone alive and healthy, despite the beating they were all taking. Somehow though, despite Kairos being corrupted, the Twelve Anew were using their own blood to gradually keep the Corruption from taking over. They weren’t winning though. It was more of a stalemate than anything else.
Worse, time seemed to be slowing down. Elkay didn’t know what was doing that.
All of a sudden, a new set of chains appeared. These seemed to stun Kairos, but at the same time, time nearly slowed down completely. Before Elkay, a new being appeared. Epani though was different, covered in little diamonds. She was clearly struggling with the manipulation of time, and had slowed things down to a crawl in order to better contain the corrupted Whenvern.
Epani reached forward and created a vast shield, blocking Kairos’s presence. Two tendrils from her tail wrapped around Elkay’s leg, which seemed to make him immune to the time-slowing-down stuff.
“Epani… what… what is going on?”
The Allmaker sighed. “Kairos is… is… ugh… I am not completely sure, but he is trying to kill us so he can replace me with Kinisis, who WAS a Life Goddess and now is a Corruption who whispers promises of love and glory. The problem is, I can keep Kairos contained, but I cannot remove him. Removing him means… no more time.”
“How… how do we stop him?” Elkay paused. “Wait… we need… a new Time Drake. Replace him with another Time Drake and time fixes itself… But that means… we will have to send someone outside the universe, to find someone who can help us.”
“Exactly.”
“And… and… for Kairos to win… he needs to remove you?”
“He needs to kill both you and me. But we… we can solve this. And we can stop Kairos from fulfilling his prophecies…”
“We can? Wait… I… I think I know what to do… Am… You can hear my thoughts, am I right?”
Epani nodded. She scanned the frozen scene ahead of her, then summoned a new tendril, pulling a familiar face towards herself and Elkay. Just like she had with Elkay, Epani severed the tendril and left it wrapped around Litvir’s leg.
“Litvir, I have a job for you.”
Litvir was bleeding quite a bit but clearly didn’t care. “Put me back! I need to protect them!”
“You are protecting them!” Epani patted Litvir on the head, healing up some of their wounds. “But I have a more important thing for you to protect. You need to go with Elkay. Take him outside the universe. Elkay will show you where to go, what to do.”
“But… I need to protect you and the universe…” Litvir whimpered.
“You are protecting me and the universe. If you protect Elkay, you protect everyone else by proxy. Help Elkay, protect him, take him where he needs to go, then bring him back.”
“But what about you?”
“We will be fine. I will make sure that everything remains frozen until you and Elkay come back. Then we will fix everything together. Do you understand?”
Litvir shuddered, but quickly relented. “Yes… yes, Kyr Epani.”
“Good kid. Now, please, take Elkay to the top of the universe. He’ll tell you where to go from there.”
Elkay made his way over and grabbed Litvir’s hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll be alright.”
With one last whimper, Litvir picked Elkay up and held him tightly. The two deities then disappeared in a flash of light.
Epani glanced around, then tutted to herself. The room covered itself in crystal, then expanded, freezing first the library, then, slowly, the entire universe, in a Corruption-proof diamond substance. While she couldn’t destroy the Corruption, she could at least stop it from spreading, even if it meant slowing time down to almost nothing.
“Be quick, little ones. You can do this, you will do this, but the quicker, the better…”