The Eclipse of the Abyss struck like a cosmic sledgehammer—a shudder that fractured reality itself. But war was not a single, annihilating blow; it was a series of careful, harrowing instruments, each more precise and dreadful than the last. Alongside the void, Mordecai honed his other great weapon: the Bone Serpent.
It was no longer the wild, desperate outburst of a grieving boy. The Bone Serpent had grown with him—its monstrous length now capable of encircling a city block, its skull looming overhead, a silent monument to suffering. But more than its size, it had gained purpose. It was no longer merely his pain; it was the vessel for his will. And that will, now, was torn in two.
He now understood, with cold clarity, that the Serpent's default state was annihilation. Its jaws, born from the memory of war-death, did more than bite; they unmade. They turned bodies to silence, to broken, bloody puzzles. To invoke it was to feel the echo of Umbra's fall in his marrow, a chilling resonance that lingered for hours after the construct faded.
But the locket had changed the equation. Cassandra was a prisoner, not merely a casualty. The objective was extraction, not extermination. He could not afford to unleash a force of nature that would obliterate everything in its path, including her. What he required was a scalpel, not a quake.
So, he practiced restraint with the patience of a monk in the same broken industrial yard where he had tested the Eclipse. He would summon the Serpent, feeling the familiar pain of its creation: cold sweat, pressure in his bones, and the taste of old graves. The huge spine would coil in the air, the large human skull turning its empty gaze toward a target, like a stack of concrete pillars or a rusted water tower.
At first, his command was a single note: Destroy.
And it would. The Serpent would strike, reducing concrete to dust and steel to twisted shrapnel. The cost was a hollow, aching fatigue and the ghost of screams in his ears.But then, he began to try something new, something infinitely more difficult. He would pour his will not into the command to break but into the concept of capture. Contain. Restrain.
The Serpent, a thing of pure instinct and death, resisted. It was like trying to command a hurricane to tidy a room. The first attempts were a bunch of messy, violent failures. The construct would ensnare its target, but the pressure of its coils would still pulverise, and the closing of its jaws would still sever and crush.
This was where Kaiphus became more than a guardian; it became an apprentice in the art of mercy.
Seeing his struggle, the cloak began to intervene. As Mordecai focused on restraint, Kaiphus would unfurl. A long, ribbon-like strip of its abyssal fabric would peel away and flow into the manifestation of the Serpent. It would weave itself into the construct's form, not as bone, but as a living, pliable ligament within the jaw, a supple sheath around the crushing vertebrae.
The effect was transformative.
With Kaiphus's essence woven into it, the Serpent's nature began to change. Now, when it struck, its jaws closed with the steady grip of a constrictor instead of the snap of a bear trap. The blades that once tried to cut wrists and legs, a reflex of its magic, became dull and heavy, turning into binding chains instead of sharp edges. The victim would be trapped, unable to move, completely helpless, but still alive and aware.
The first time he successfully achieved this, holding a captured wreck of a car entirely intact within the Serpent's maw, the strain was immense. It was easier to destroy than to control. Holding the Serpent in that state of suspended violence demanded a constant, draining focus, a battle against its very essence. When he released the spell, he was left panting, his muscles were screaming, but the car settled back onto the ground, dented and gripped by phantom forces, but in one piece.
Kaiphus would retract its extended piece, often looking frayed and dimmer, needing time to rest and recover. The act of tempering death with life took a toll on both of them.
It was a fragile, hard-won balance. The Serpent was, and would always be, a thing of death. Its presence chilled the air and whispered of the charnel house. But now, it had a potential for something else. It could be a prison. A restraint. A means to an end that did not necessarily have to be bloody.
Mordecai looked at his hands post-sessions. They were the hands that could call forth the void and summon the serpent. But they were also the hands that now, with great effort and the help of a loyal friend, could choose to hold back the killing blow. The Bone Serpent was no longer just a burden of his past; but it was now a burden of his choices. And for the first time ever, he was learning that the heaviest burden was not the power to destroy, but the harder, more complex power to refuse to.