What thoughts were conductive to her escape, Arachne didn’t know. Over the course of more centuries than Arachne could count, she had only died around ten times. She wasn’t quite sure how that stacked up to other demons. Arachne tended not to socialize with many others. Yet, for some reason, she felt like the number was relatively low.
Granted, that low number might have been because she hadn’t been summoned for a majority of her existence. Her domain wasn’t about to kill her and Arachne never visited other demons’ domains.
Her first death, she hadn’t had a clue what was happening. She only vaguely recalled being decapitated before finding herself out in the endless abyss.
In all honesty, it was lucky that she hadn’t gone insane.
Spending more than fifty years with nothing but her own thoughts for company was a hell worse than any she had ever imagined.
Fifty years was little more than a ballpark figure–to use a recent mortal term. There was no possible way of telling time within the void. Even once she returned to her domain, it wasn’t like she had a timer keeping track of how long she had been gone for. It was an estimate based off of subsequent deaths, ones that she had been more prepared for.
As mortal history advanced, they became far better timekeepers than they had been while she was mortal. That, combined with more frequent summons in the recent centuries, led to her estimated number.
That carnivean had escaped in a mere three months. If that. For all Arachne knew, it had only been dead for a day before making it back to its domain.
Three months would have her missing one of Eva’s treatments, but it was still a far cry faster than fifty years.
But how had it managed that?
As far as Arachne was aware, she couldn’t do anything in this state. She couldn’t transform–or even feel her body. For all she knew, she literally was a brain in a jar on Void’s cupboard shelf. Or even just her soul in a jar. No brain needed.
Arachne did know that how soon one returned was somewhat related to how damaged they had been when they died. It took longer the more mutilated one was. Was it based off of their natural regeneration rate? Was the carnivean simply a faster regenerator than she was?
The carnivean had been quite thoroughly mutilated at her hands. Most of its tentacles had been severed along with having its eyes gouged out. And then there was the fact that Arachne had crushed the carnivean’s skull.
But, when she had seen it in Sawyer’s hotel, it hadn’t regenerated fully. It was still missing its eyes and several tentacles, especially the larger ones.
Arachne had never returned even partially damaged. She had always been whole and hearty no matter how damaged her body had been when she died.
There had to be a way to return early.
She had mocked the carnivean at the time, wondering if it died so often that clawing its way out of this void had become second nature. But at the moment, Arachne was willing to give anything to know how it had managed that.
Anything?
Hello, thanks for reading.
Book seven will continue as scheduled. No intermissions or interludes. Tune in next time for 007.001.
Before anything else, I’d just like to say thanks. Thanks to all my supporters on Patreon and PayPal.
Phew, that was a long one. Book six was the longest book yet in terms of chapter count. Word count was actually about on par with the other twenty-eight chapter books. That stems mostly from a few of the chapters winding up longer than I had intended. Like more than 7k words. I wound up splitting a few of those chapters partially because of the time it took to write. The other part would be my personal belief that 3k-5k word chapters are ideal both for reading and writing.
Not a whole lot that I want or need to talk about regarding this book. I felt pretty good about writing it the entire way through. There were some vague allusions and comments with Wayne, Zoe, and Serena about their history with the Elysium Order. That will probably be how any of their pasts is revealed in the future, rather than a follow up to Wayne’s interlude in book five.
I have removed that note at the top of chapter 28. I figure that most of the people who saw the original version of chapter 27 will have already read 28 by now and I’d rather not confuse future readers. The comment on chapter 27 will still remain.
And that is one thing that I’d like to mention. It slipped my mind while writing that the teleport and the storage would be affected by the same wards. So thanks, hattrick21. Pointing things out like that helps quite a bit. I hope to not have any other issues, but I am merely human.
Now for some side notes:
