'No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!'. Levi's scream tore through the warped silence, echoing inside both his mind and the leech's slimy skull.
He dragged the grotesque body forward, its flesh sloshing wetly against the floor. Toward Cecilia. Toward her warmth. The instinct— the hunger— pressed harder than his own thoughts.
When he reached her back, the body moved on its own. The torso twisted unnaturally, and the coils of the monstrous form lunged. Venomous fangs stabbed downward— not by Levi's will, but by the instinct of the leech.
Levi's voice cracked with rage and terror, his scream colliding with the sickening body, and for a moment, it caused a dissonance between his soul and the parasite's body.
The strike went off course— barely. The fangs buried themselves just below Cecilia's hip, grazing flesh. Venom seeped into her flesh, enough for it to knock her down.
The leech writhed madly, thrashing against itself as if caught in its own contradiction. Levi felt his identity bleeding away with each moment. Every second in this body was a theft, a stripping of himself into something alien.
'No—bNo! I'll— lose— everything—'. He rasped, forcing the wriggling mass to crawl. No walk, he didn't dare to try to control the legs of the creature.
Levi crawled forward with a human stubbornness, inching toward the glowing pile of golden ashes shimmering before him.
Then he heard it. A whisper.
At first, faint scratches in his ears. He ignored them, his one words of anger drowning the whispers, but they grew louder, clearer, pressing into the gaps of his mind.
"Stay… A… inheri… second… heaven… Stay… supposed… die… leave…"
The words tangled and snapped like broken glass. He strained, focusing through the chaos of instincts gnawing inside him.
Although it sounded just beside his nonexistent ears, he could tell it was coming from behind him.
He tracked the voice and then his gaze froze.
Lyra.
Her mouth hung open, lips cracked like burned parchment, flakes of dust falling with every syllable. The skin around her mouth flaked apart into slow motes, dissolving into the air around her.
Her eyes opened.
Hollow. Vacant. Yet they saw. They pierced through the parasite's flesh, through the writhing hunger, straight into Levi's soul.
Levi's gut dropped, he knew the implications of the scene before him, from the novel, he knew exactly what this was.
Possession.
Hell, he was guilty of the same crime— his soul inside the body of the leech.
And it didn't take a scholar to parse her— no, the being's— words.
"Stay away… from the inheritance… second heaven… stay away… it is hers… die… leave…"
Levi's heart hammered. He understood.
The being wasn't addressing Lyra. It was addressing him.
The "inheritance"— the glowing golden ashes of the Three-Legged Golden Crow.
And "Second Heaven."
From the novel, he knew the truth. The Second Heaven of Fire and Rebirth.
Cecilia. The inheritor of the Second Heaven.
They was a reason the name of the novel was called Celestial Worthy Of Twelve Heavens.
And this being, even if he was thinking with his knees he knew that it was a Deity taking.
And what did Levi do.
He turned around and increased his moving speed, he didn't want to sound racist. But he would rather die then turn it a leech forever.
Just as he had expected the Deity couldn't move Lyra's body. The body couldn't bare even a sliver of the deity's soul. That's why even talking Lyra's body was breaking down to dust.
The deity started mutter incomprehensible words, Levi didn't even pay mind, too fearful to even think.
But the more he moved the more he realized that it became easier to pilot the leech's body.
After what felt like forever he arrived at the pedestal, the golden ashes just before him, but he felt a feeling of wrongness.
A wrongness so profound he instinctively started to tear at his body. The muttering of the Deity in the background increased this sense of wrongness.
He then looked used his soul sight to catch a glimpse of his soul and what he saw almost made him go mad.
From his lower chest downward.
Had turned to that of a leech.