Princess Of The Skulls - Chapter 50: Chapter 50

The journey back from the temporal facility felt like moving through a world made of glass—beautiful but fragile, liable to shatter at the slightest pressure. The sacrifice that had contained the entity had left reality feeling thin in its wake, as if the boundaries between possible and actual had been permanently weakened.
I rode in silence, still struggling to understand what I'd lost when my mother and grandfather's timelines dissolved. Memories surfaced and vanished like fish in dark water—fragments of conversations I couldn't quite recall, lessons in magic that had been partially erased, moments of warmth and guidance that now existed only as emotional echoes.
Through our soul-bond, Aldric was providing what stability he could, his memories helping to anchor the parts of myself that remained intact. But even he couldn't replace what had been fundamentally erased from existence.
"The next facility showing signs of failure is three days' ride east," Lydia said, breaking the oppressive silence. "Something called the Dreamer is beginning to stir."
"The Dreamer?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
"An entity that exists in the space between sleeping and waking. When it manifests fully, it turns reality into a living nightmare where thoughts become flesh and fears take on independent existence." She glanced at me with what might have been sympathy. "It's considerably more dangerous than the temporal entity we just contained."
The thought of facing another cosmic horror so soon after losing pieces of myself was daunting. But through the Armor of Echoes, I could feel the network of containment sites throughout both kingdoms.
The magical discharge from our battle at the cathedral had indeed accelerated the failure of ancient seals, and time was running out faster than anyone had anticipated.
"How many people live within the Dreamer's potential area of effect?" Lord Cassius asked with military pragmatism.
"Approximately fifty thousand," Dorian replied. "Including the capital cities of three minor duchies."
The number hit me like a physical blow. Fifty thousand innocent people would die horribly if we failed to contain the entity. Fifty thousand lives are depending on our ability to find solutions that don't require erasing ourselves from existence.
"There might be another way," I said slowly, an idea forming in the fractured spaces of my consciousness.
"The Armor of Echoes incorporated elements from the dissolved timelines. What if we could use it to create artificial anchors instead of requiring living sacrifices?"
Dorian's inhuman features shifted into an expression of interest. "Theoretically possible, but incredibly dangerous. The armor is already straining to hold your fragmented identity together. Adding temporal binding magic to its functions could cause complete dissolution of your sense of self."
"Better than asking someone else to sacrifice their existence."
"Is it?" Lydia asked pointedly. "You're arguably the most powerful Princess of Skulls in history. If we lose you to magical dissolution, who will face the remaining fourteen entities?"
It was a fair question, but one I couldn't answer without knowing more about the threats we faced. The ancestral memories I'd absorbed from the crystal vial had been partially damaged by my grandfather's sacrifice, leaving gaps in my knowledge of previous encounters with cosmic horrors.
"Tell me about the other entities," I said to Dorian. "What are we really facing?"
He was quiet for a long moment, his expression growing more alien as he considered how much to reveal. "Things that predate human civilization by millions of years. Beings for whom our entire species is a brief footnote in cosmic history. They were imprisoned not because they were evil, but because they were incompatible with life as we understand it."
"Incompatible, how?"
"Some exist in states of matter that poison reality itself. Others feed on concepts—love, hope, the possibility of future happiness. A few are simply too large to coexist with our dimensional space without crushing everything we've built."
The scope of it was overwhelming. We weren't just fighting monsters—we were fighting forces of nature that operated on scales beyond human comprehension.
"And your organization has been preparing for this for centuries?" Aldric asked through our bond.
"Preparing, yes. But never expecting to face all seventeen entities simultaneously," Lydia admitted. "The plan was always to deal with escapes one at a time, over decades or centuries. What happened tonight has compressed that timeline to months or weeks."
As we crested the hill overlooking the cathedral where our night's adventure had begun, I could see that the damage was worse than I'd remembered. The ancient building was partially collapsed, its sacred geometry disrupted by the forces we'd unleashed. More concerning, the glowing symbols in the ground had spread, creating a network of eldritch light that pulsed with dangerous potential.
"The ley lines are destabilizing," Dorian observed with clinical detachment. "Each containment failure will accelerate the others. We're looking at a cascade effect that could release everything within a matter of days."
"Then we need to change our approach," I said, making a decision that felt like stepping off a cliff.
"Instead of trying to contain them one by one, we need to find a way to reinforce all the seals simultaneously."
"Impossible," Lydia said immediately. "The magical requirements would be astronomical. You'd need to sacrifice entire cities to generate that much power."
"Not if we use a different kind of sacrifice." I turned to look at each member of our unlikely alliance.
"What if instead of sacrificing lives or timelines, we sacrifice the power sources themselves?"
The idea had come from the damaged memories of previous Princesses of Skulls—fragments of techniques that had been considered too dangerous to attempt. But desperate times called for desperate measures.
"You're talking about destroying the entities rather than containing them," Dorian said slowly. "That's never been successfully achieved."
"Because previous attempts used conventional weapons against unconventional targets. But the Armor of
Echoes are made from conquered powers. What if we could incorporate the essence of each entity we face, using their nature against them?"
It was insane, and potentially suicidal. But as I felt the network of failing seals pulsing through the ley lines beneath us, I realized it might be our only option.
"The process would change you fundamentally," Lydia warned. "Absorbing the essence of seventeen cosmic horrors would make you something that's no longer remotely human."
"And if I don't, fifty thousand people die when the Dreamer escapes. Fifty thousand more with each subsequent failure." I looked at the ruined cathedral, at the evidence of powers that had already been unleashed. "I became the Princess of Skulls to protect people. If becoming something inhuman is the price of that protection, then I'll pay it."
Through our soul-bond, I felt Aldric's mixture of pride and terror at my decision. He knew as well as I did that the path I was choosing might save the world, but it would almost certainly destroy the person I'd been.
But as we rode toward whatever came next, I held onto the warmth of his love and the fragments of my mother's guidance that had survived the temporal sacrifice. Whatever I became, those connections would remain. They would have to be enough to keep me anchored to humanity, even as I became something else entirely.
The true test was about to begin.