The dive into the pool of bubbling green energy was horrific, and by the sloughing off of skin and terrible burning in his throat Thomas was quite confident that he was dying. The blinking of the dark and light switching in and out, the falling off and the regrowth of his fingers -- his teeth -- whole limbs was painful to the extreme.

[Hero Summoned Complete]

[Change Magic Engaged]

[Hold]

The acidic clawing at each angle and part of his body doubled, and tripled down as it entered his nose and ears and throat and eyes -- everywhere that could ‘welcome’ such a horrible deluge did, and with the regeneration it felt as if he was scratching himself apart. There was no sound, not anymore at least, as the bubbling, sizzling, then silence stretched on as touch itself failed to signal anything to his brain.

He was going to die here.

“Calm yourself, Knight of True Justice. It will -- oh that looks worse than I thought it’d be.” a voice spoke directly into the mind of Thomas, since he was blind and deaf from his eyes boiling out of his skull and his tongue floating out of his mouth, regenerating, then deteriorating again to a pockmarked strip of flesh. Thomas, for his part, wanted to respond -- but with his scream-response making more and more of the acidic bile-whatever enter his lungs it only served to course the stuff down his throat and into him further.

“You will exit this stronger than before, true believer. You, who prayed for this day of deliverance shall be shown to be one with the purpose of those who rise against that power which holds only lies between its teeth. You -- wow it just is not stopping is it?” the voice, so noble, hauntingly ethereal, and convincing in its sweeping charisma -- couldn’t hold on as it dropped it to a more normal conversational tone as whatever was happening to Thomas must have looked truly horrific. Thomas, for his part, only projected his thoughts (IE: screaming in his mind) about how much pain he was in. It sounded something like this.

“AAAAAHHHHHHH!” and it resounded like a struck gong. He heard wincing, like someone reacting to too-loud music, which made Thomas react by only screaming louder.

“Gird yourself Knight of True Justice. The pain gives way to form, one that no [Hero] can hope to match.” the voice seemed sure of this, confidence unwavering even as it (probably) watched the horror before it unfold.

Thomas wasn’t so convinced. He tried to thrash, to swim out of it, but his arm detached and he felt an emptiness in the shoulder socket, the shoulder girdle itself detaching and the feeling of flesh, muscle, and bone peeling off was unmistakably horrific. No longer able to keep any sense of panic from seizing him he hyperventilated, more and more of the juices digesting and regenerating him as he cried out soundlessly in the pool. He reached one hand, unmistakably larger and more robust than before to the shoulder, but the very touch of it crushed the rib cage beneath like wet paper.

Finally, graciously and with much mercy, he closed his non-working eyes and sunk. He hit the bottom of the pool, and took horrid burning breaths like a vessel taking on acidic bile into its hull.

“Sleep now, Knight of True Justice. Sleep, and you shall be granted what so many have sought after. The form of the Xur, the form of the unknown beast -- and so shall you become one of the many. The pain shall give way, and in its place strength will arrive like waves to the shore of the great beach of eternity. For you are our mercy to a world made sick with a disease of lost divinities.” was the last thing that Thomas heard, his corpse-body turning lesser and lesser, regenerating greater and greater, and so it was in a cycle while the man known as Thomas slept at the bottom of the pit.

-----------------------------------

There was once a land here, on these the most desolate rocks they call islands. Cities of lush forests grown into palaces of wondrous gold. Spires the size of mountains climbed up to pierce the skies and claw at the stars in their orbit, while ceremonies to the moon -- she of the closed eyes -- were common.

There was grain and cattle, riches beyond the dreams of the many who stayed here with warriors and sages and warlocks of the gods. There was plenty, and plenty, and plenty.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Then a shadow. A thing of many limbs and mouths and languages. It crawled over everything, the One Land, and began to shatter the very planet with its wrath. It was a thing of horrors, and from its mouths birthed horrors anew. New things, new monsters, spawned from it in rushes and and limbs.

The First Demon made its home in the north and the south, splitting to become a King and Queen both. It became the dark sludge of the south that corrupted the natural world with its ichor and bile. It became the miasma of the north and spread to choke any with noxious fumes and fated hatred. It became as a thing that was unconscionable to behold, and split into further strangeness and monstrous horror.

With the sundering of the world came cracks in the unity that had once held the world. For the West took the warlocks and turned their backs upon the gods, gripping magics that were once holy and casting them at the demons as batteries and weapons of great war. To the East they took the sages, and their teachings of the single droplet among the raging sea was turned into the cultivation arts that they keep to this day, a corrupted version of the warriors that once patrolled the great unity of the past.

And so the original of the land, the original of the people, were left in the ever lessening center. They were adrift on an island that had once been the bedrock of civilization itself. The West drifted further, fueled by magical experiments and ever increasing belief in their own power to cast away the workings of the past. The East was no better, circling a drain of self-serving mysticism to obfuscate the rather straight-forward nature of the powers that came before, along with a collectivism for the bottom tiers and a growing individualism for those higher up on their power-scaling. A person was only a person, in both societies it seemed, if they could impress upon the world itself their personhood.

Then came the ‘gods’, creatures of [REDACTED] who supplanted the [REDACTED] from before. The deal was struck, the leaders of the two continents agreed, and they managed to push back from the north and south to slay the King and Queen respectively, both.

With the help of the [Heroes] of course, people stripped from distant stars to serve the powers of the gods themselves -- to served the betrayers of [REDACTED].

So we, those left behind for so long -- we who did not delve unto the altar of despair and become as creatures of it much the same. We who did not cast aside our beginnings to become lauded as Wizards without the divine or Sages without the warrior nature needed. We did not, and thuse we became lesser things. Lesser over time, on our rock of increasing desolation. Cycles have occurred, rises and crashes.

Then came the wars. There was a price from the creatures of [REDACTED] to have the promise kept. To go to war with each other with the same weapons that had once been the thing that kept them from destruction and desolation. The [Heroes] had to return, over and over, to keep the things at the north and the south sealed. To keep the sludge and the miasma deep inside the rocks and crystals and snow. To keep the generals hidden on the line in the middle of the world, slumbering. To keep the world from its damnation, they had to cast eternally hateful spells at the other.

And where was this battleground? Where did they end this conflict after putting down the popping up battlefields on their own continents? Our land, of course. They brought there war here, treated us -- US -- as servants on a land they devastated over and over. We wouldn’t rebel, either. How could we? The creatures of [REDACTED] had given a gift to these once-mortals.

The System, they called it. A system that made them demi-gods.

We had tried to resist, once. We had crawled away from that resistance with a tenth of the population we once had, and the last of our civilization had been wiped away as if it had never been.

So we became crafty, those of us who did not delve deep below into and unto the altar of despair. To do that was to become worse than the interlopers. To do that was to praise the King and Queen of the North and South. To do that was to give into the nihilism they wanted from us, to make us into their ultimate villain.

There a light shone. A light in the caves below the world, beckoning to those of us on the islands above to become as the monsters that they wanted us, and some did. How even my brothers and sisters, those that I once knew as the true and grand became disillusioned to the world and delved into those shadows where only hate could blossom as a rotten flower that would eat the soul.

And we were alone. Relegated to servants of the conquerors every few centuries that they would arrive -- full of piss and vinegar to do a useless battle on our island that had become a ritual circle for their battles.

You may not know who I am, nor why we have brought you -- and I am sorry. Sorry to strip you from a world you knew and bring you towards a place so cruel. But hear me! You, the soul imbibed of the great strength that we have searched and who goes through the transformation of being that takes place now. You are are last hope, truly. For they ask of us to become as they are, to give up and crawl to their lands defeated. We will not. We shall win this war of attrition, thousands of years in the making, and slay the creatures of [REDACTED].

Behold!