image [https://i.imgur.com/xcQhW8Y.jpg]
My hand reached for the doorknob, my mind swirling with the whispering voices of my past lives—the shattered fragments of my soul—sometimes in unison, often not.
I glanced back at the mirror. Gone were my green and black hair and pale, tattooed skin. Instead, the reflection showed the pudding—my skin woven from head to toe with white spider silk, my true flesh of black pudding displayed like a summer dress. My hair, now long and flowing, was part of this transformation, each strand twisting and writhing like living tendrils.
Blake is dead.
You are Blake.
“I’m still Blake,” I whispered back to my inner voices, to my inner nightmares.
We are Blake.
After Magic had thoroughly destroyed my soul, I was alive again—or was I? My mind remained fragmented, the voices whispering as though surrounding me. Yet I continued to gaze at my reflection.
I had become a true eldritch abomination, and yet... so much more.
Pain seared through my body, burning from the inside out—reminiscent of the suffering inflicted by Holy magic. The agony licked up from the depths of my soul. I smothered it with a wicked giggle.
Shattered.
You’re broken.
Pain.
We’re suffering.
Alone.
Always alone!
Shattered.
I ignored the whispers.
The glowing golden cracks that once marred my soul were absent. I was no longer peering into my soul but observing the outer façade I presented to the world. With deranged, luminescent orange eyes, I turned away, my cruel smile unwavering. I refused to reveal just how broken I was inside.
No, I would laugh and smile, defiant against my fractured self, rebelling against the searing agony. Embracing my madness with a cackle, I turned the doorknob and stepped into the unknown—only to find myself in a familiar little cottage.
“Sweetie!”
Umph.
I blinked in confusion as Duskara, the Goddess of Dreams, leaped at me, wrapping her arms around me in a loving hug. She appeared in her youthful form, smiling from ear to ear as she pulled back to look at me. Her other two forms were quite different: one was that of an old hag, often insultingly referred to as the Crone; the other was a cowled figure shrouded in darkness, her thin skeletal body clad in a tattered gown, skeletal fingers eerily visible.
But now? She was dressed in her youthful guise, strikingly adorned in a frilly outfit like some kind of princess—clothes all white with hints of pink, black trimming and bows. She looked as if she had just emerged from mourning, now jubilant and brimming with life. I was taken aback, unsure if this was the same goddess I knew.
Pulling my gaze from her smiling face, I glanced around the cottage, finding no one else there.
Had we imagined the conversation I heard?
Maybe we did hear voices?
I stiffened. My thoughts were odd now. It’s hard to explain. I’m used to talking and answering my own thoughts in my mind, but this was... different, as if the whispering voices were conversing among themselves, yet still being me. I couldn’t tell how many voices there were, but I could still feel them coalescing into their factions.
Ugh! We’re not going to go to war with my own sanity, are we?
Nah, we already lost that battle.
A chorus of snickering echoed in the back of my thoughts.
Pain.
Shattered.
Alone.
There were other whispers, parts of my fragmented soul that hadn’t yet found a faction, but I ignored those fragments... or would it be we?
Oh shit, am I now a hive mind made up of fragments of myself?
Nah.
Maybe?
NO!
Yes?
BwahahahaHAHAHAHAHA!
Laughter ricocheted inside my skull, every shattered piece of my essence joining the hysterical chorus. Oh, the madness we—or was it just me?—embraced. Not that it mattered; they were me, after all. Who else would I be laughing at if not myself and my delightful delusions?
“You’re insane!” a sly voice chimed in—my own voice.
“Shut it,” I snapped, ignoring the concerned look on Duskara’s face.
I’ve always had conversations with myself, but now the replies came from different corners of my fractured soul, each with its own twisted sense of humor. Maybe I should ignore the solo hecklers—the quieter individual pieces of my soul—and tune into the rowdier two factions that were still forming.
Always hated unions.
Now you’re sounding like our old stepdad.
“Fuck you!” I blurted out.
“No, fuck you!” I shouted back.
Duskara blinked in surprise at me.
It seemed like there were two main troublemakers tonight.
What were these fragmented whispers—my dreams brawling with my nightmares? Loneliness having a slapfight with cruelty? Or sanity playing chicken with insanity? I should name these factions of myself. No! Labels are for jars, and I’ve never been fond of being boxed in. Humanity loves its little tribes, always ready to cast stones at outsiders. Slapping a label on yourself is like painting a target on your back—begging to be judged, even hated.
But perhaps I enjoyed being the villain, the one they loved to despise. Or was that just another argument between the clashing idiots in my head? What the hell was I becoming? What twisted path was I skipping down now?
Maybe I’ll label these aspects of myself later—maybe I won’t.
“Sweetie, what’s wrong?” Duskara placed her soothing hand on my cheek, and the voices within me stilled.
Now, it was I who blinked in confusion. It was as if a million different shards of myself had been buzzing around in an angry swarm—well, two swarms with stragglers in between—and then suddenly, they all flew as one. My thoughts were more at ease. More unified.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked, my voice sounding far meeker than I intended. “Why does it feel like I’m burning up from the inside out?”
“Divinity doesn’t mix well with what you’ve become,” a little girl from seemingly nowhere answered as my eyes darted around. “It would be a mercy to end you.”
Duskara stiffened before whirling around in utter outrage, the entire cottage seeming to tremble with her anger. No—it felt as if the entire realm shook with fury as Duskara yelled, “She’s my daughter!”
“Daughter?” I breathed out, confused.
We did hear her say we were hers, didn’t we?
Stop using ‘we’; it’s just ‘I’!
I say ‘we’!
Ugh, bitch!
Is that ‘I’ bitches or ‘we’ bitch?
Fuck ‘we’!
Fuck you!
Fuck me?
‘I’ fuck.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
My thoughts buzzed again—a swarm of arguments, insults, and snickering—as I tried to process what was happening. The voices didn’t even have the decency to stay in their forming factions this time.
Taken aback, I stepped away from the Goddess of Dreams. Suddenly, the floor vanished beneath me.
“Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me!” I yelped as I plunged into darkness, catching only the last snippets of a conversation.
“What are you doing?!” Duskara’s panicked voice echoed as my consciousness...es slipped away.
“Helping,” was the last thing I heard before the abyss swallowed me whole.
The cool embrace of darkness enveloped me, eliciting no fear—it was an extension of my being, soothing like a lullaby to a fretful child. I existed within this veil, a creature woven from the fabric of nightmares. I tumbled through the abyss, all the while sensing unseen eyes scrutinizing every fragment of my fractured self.
Then, suddenly, light pierced the darkness as I plummeted through an open hole and smashed onto a stone surface with a sickening splat. My gooey dress splashed everywhere, the pudding contained within my silk form sloshing around as my body compressed like a plastic bag filled with liquid.
I groaned, flipping over—my now flat, silk-white, and bare ass pressed against the cold surface—as I gazed upward with orange eyes.
Blinking away the veil of darkness, a celestial view unfolded above. Lying on my back, I stared into a night sky swirling with clouds and gently cascading snowflakes. Through fleeting gaps in the cloud cover, a colossal planet revealed itself, bathed in shades of pink and blue. Its ever-shifting storms reminded me of images I’d seen of Jupiter, yet the scale was grander, more enthralling. I recognized the celestial body immediately; never had it loomed so large, so breathtaking.
Ever so quietly, I whispered the name of what I saw, “Völuspá.”
Alone.
Always alone.
I shook my head, ignoring the whispers of my own mind.
My surroundings gradually seeped into awareness. The stony embrace beneath me belonged to a crude altar positioned at the heart of a stone chamber—I surmised it was a respawn point. How delightfully cliché.
“Worst. Respawn. Ever,” I sighed.
The chamber I found myself in was crowned by an open ceiling, framing the celestial dance above. Despite the cold stone and the snow’s tender descent, a soft warmth brushed against my skin, courtesy of the planet’s light painting everything in shades of pink and blue. Not that the cold truly bothered my eldritch self—perks of being a black pudding monstrosity.
A fleeting image caught the edge of my vision—a figure draped in pink, scythe aloft, ready to swoop down in a cold arc of fury. A little girl’s face was twisted with rage, her eyes pooled in an abyss, and even my own darkness seemed to shy away from it. As I jerked my head toward this harbinger of Death, the space she had occupied blinked into emptiness.
“My imagination?” The words slipped out in a shaky whisper.
My hand, trembling, lifted before my face as if trying to grasp the fading remnants of that spectral vision.
Betrayed.
Discarded.
“Oh, shut up!”
Okay, tuning out the whispering voices in my head wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. I just needed to focus on ignoring the random chatter and pay attention to the factions like I had planned. At least the factions were a major focus in my thoughts—just as insane as I was, because those voices were my own; I was the voices within my head.
A stark realization smacked me upside the head—this respawn was unlike all the others, and I’d been too lost in my own twisted thoughts to notice. My wandering imagination had taken a joyride, but now I was captivated by my own hand.
All the others? How many times have we died?
It’s ‘I’. How many times have ‘I’ died?!
‘I’ hate you!
Wouldn’t that be ‘I’ hate ‘we’?
“Enough,” I groaned, giving myself a headache from my own wandering and snickering mad thoughts.
I lay there, enshrined in my human form, no shapeshifting required. My skin, as white as spun spider silk, concealed the eerie darkness simmering beneath. This nifty silk shell—or flesh, as I like to think of it, since it helps with subconscious casting—was the result of my victory over those damn spiderlings, an early conquest in this reality that bequeathed me the Silk Webbing skill.
It was a veil over my true form: the black pudding monstrosity I’d become upon being reincarnated—or summoned—into this realm. The specifics remained as blurry as ever. However... hadn’t I just been with the Goddess of Dreams in this form?
I glanced around, spotting fragments of my dress splattered all over the walls—pieces of my flesh I’d subconsciously used with Polymorph. That’s how most of my skills worked. If I tried to control them without the system commands, the result was always lackluster. But if I just let go—no overthinking, just pure instinct and desire—I could pull off some badass shit. Hence the silk skin, even silk teeth. The best I could manage when micromanaging the skill was a cat’s cradle in my hands.
Yep, it’s really a hands-off approach.
Still...
“What was up with this respawn?”
My gaze lingered on my bare form, a tender glow of orange enshrouding it—a reflection of the haunting luminescence of my eyes. This glow stemmed from channeling my Mana Focus into the orbs that allowed me to perceive the world with a semblance of humanity I had long lost. The skill was utterly intuitive, another subconscious cast that manifested without requiring even a thought, allowing me to see mana within and around everything like splashes of watercolors and pastels—far more vivid than that poor technicolor eyesight you’ve got.
Easing my body to the side, I swung my legs over the edge of the altar and frowned when I noticed I was still oddly proportioned after slamming into it. Thankfully, it only took a tingle of desire in the back of my screwy mind for the pudding within my silk flesh sack to start rearranging itself back to the proper proportions—hips, breasts, and ass... Oh, and apparently, my smashed-in face was also fixed; I hadn’t realized that was an issue until my nose popped back out—yeah, I had an innie there.
“Yep,” I nodded to myself. “Worst respawn ever.”
The gentle descent of my bare toes came to rest upon the cold stone floor below, where they sank slightly into the sparkling crunch of snow—a field of white kissed by the colorful hues of Völuspá as it peered through the plump clouds above.
With a mere thought, I beckoned forth my true form, anticipating the enveloping cloak of darkness that ought to shroud me in a gown of writhing blackness, caressed by tendrils of cruelty and nightmares—all the while, the splattered parts of me started creeping back toward me.
“That’s new,” I mused as I watched a few globs of pudding reach my foot and ooze upward to reform my dress.
With my dress finally formed, I stretched out my arms, tossed my head back, and gazed upward as I took a deep, satisfying breath—which, of course, wasn’t needed—oxygen, that is. But that circles back to the whole subconscious casting I mentioned. Having been human in my last life, teeth, lungs, toes, and yes, all the naughty bits, felt natural to me. So without thinking, Polymorph whipped them up as effortlessly as... well, breathing.
“What to do, what to do,” I muttered, crossing my arms and tapping my chin with a finger as I looked around, unsure of where the hell I was or where to go next. “This doesn’t seem to be a dungeon… so no leveling. Boooooo!”
There was no real rush or urgency here. Heck, in fact, I never felt safer. All I had was a crippling desire to find my Aislinn—or Aurelia, depending on which version of her we’re talking about. But that’s just semantics. She was my everything, she was my soulmate.
Soulmates, it seems, weren’t just the stuff of romantic tales; the splitting of souls at their inception was akin to the birth of twins. Bound by an ethereal thread, these souls would eternally seek each other out, transcending death, reincarnation, and the confines of flesh.
Damn, that almost sounds philosophical.
Shut up! I’m trying to listen. It’s getting good.
Bleeding-heart romantics are the worst.
Zip it!
Aurelia was the puzzle piece I’d been missing—the other half of our fractured and shattered soul. This revelation explained so much, yet there was a nagging feeling that Aurelia held answers we still sought.
Wait, does that make her a part of the ‘we’?
That’s it, I’m stabbing myself right in the ‘I’!
Annoyed with myself, I gave my head a sharp smack. “Shut up, you chaotic mess,” I muttered, hoping to silence the cacophony of thoughts clanging around in there. With a huff, I whispered to the empty chamber and the snowflakes sneaking in through the gap in the ceiling, “I need to get back to her.”
Time to escape this weird circular place. A grin—one that would probably send strangers running—spread across my face as I sauntered toward the arched doorway. Half-expecting a sprawling underground labyrinth (thanks for nothing, past traumas), I was mildly disappointed when I still didn’t get any dungeon vibes. Instead, I stepped straight into the cold embrace of a dead forest.
“Well, isn’t this just charming,” I snickered. The trees swayed slowly, their dark, barren branches reaching out like skeletal fingers dancing to a tune only they could hear. No leaves, of course, but the snowflakes falling from the sky decided to decorate their twisted limbs. How considerate.
Each crunching step on the snow-covered ground seemed to deepen the eerie silence. Yet, the forest whispered—a chilly, gentle murmur that played with the gooey edges of my dress. Alone in this snow-kissed wasteland, I felt a strange comfort. It reminded me of the woods outside Duskara’s cottage—minus the occasional screaming, of course.
Surprisingly, I was in a fantastic mood. Lost in some unknown land without a map back to my soulmate, possible dangers lurking behind every creepy tree—and I couldn’t stop grinning. Who knows, maybe I was losing it. Or perhaps I’d already lost it long ago. Either way, I started skipping through the forest like a deranged ballerina, arms swinging and head bobbing to a song only I could hear.
“I’m so hungry, I could eat a whole troll!” I sang out, giggling at the thought. Roasted or raw? Decisions, decisions. Who am I kidding? I prefer my meat spoiled.
Mmmmm! Intestines are the best.
I like to wear them as an edible necklace!
…
A few times, I caught shadows darting between the trees. “Oh, come out, come out, wherever you are!” I called, my voice dripping with mock sweetness. But nothing approached; everything seemed smart enough to keep its distance. “Suit yourselves, cowards,” I shrugged, continuing my merry, slightly maniacal frolic.
Then, a glow in the distance caught my eye. The forest abruptly ended with a stark line in the sand. “What the actual hell? Am I still in the Realm of Dreams?” I scratched my left breast in thought. What? It itched with that burning sensation I hadn’t gotten rid of. Deal with it.
Ugh. I hope it’s not chlamydia.
The time ‘we’ got gonorrhea was worse.
I’d like to cast a vote and say that was a ‘you’ problem.
On one side, sunlight bathed rolling sand dunes; on the other, the night sky ruled, accompanied by gently falling snow. I blinked once, twice, then burst into laughter.
“Oh, this place is just showing off now!” With a carefree shrug, I decided why not—stepped into the sunlight, and headed up a nearby dune.
As I reached the top, vast marble walls sprawled in every direction. A castle turret peeked over the walls, teasing me with just a glimpse. Thankfully, a large gate with a line of weary travelers came into view. Before joining the queue, I glanced back at the forest—only to find it had vanished. Gone. Poof. Just endless sand now.
“Well, that’s not disconcerting at all,” I mused, tapping my foot in mock impatience. “Worst. Respawn. Ever!” I declared once again to no one in particular, nodding sagely.
A string of colorful curses slipped out—oopsie daisy—as I made my way to the end of the line. Funny enough, none of the other travelers seemed to notice me. Their complaints about the desert trek were almost musical. Under different circumstances, I might’ve joined in with a few grievances of my own—or maybe killed someone for fun… and a light snack.
The guard at the gate droned, “Next,” his voice as lifeless as this sandy abyss. “Welcome to Slaethia. That’ll be six copper for entry,” he recited, sounding like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“I haven’t a coin to my name,” I announced cheerfully, flashing him a grin that probably showed a bit too much teeth.
“Name?” He didn’t even look up.
“Blake. Blake… Pudding!”
Set him on fire!
Noooooo! Fire bad. Me don’t like fire.
We could just kill him and waltz right in.
Lost in an amusing conversation with the voices in my head—my voices—we all giggled as I giggled along with them—with myself—at the various thoughts racing through.
“Origin?” he sighed.
“Straight outta your momma—I mean, hailing from the grand land of vaaagina…stan,” I said with faux innocence.
He finally glanced at my face, a flicker of confusion crossing his face before the monotony swallowed it again. “Six copper, Blake Pudding of Vagina-stan.”
I patted my sides theatrically, as if I had pockets. “Oops! Yeppers, it seems I’m still fresh out of coins.”
The guard’s gaze had already drifted elsewhere. I looked behind me—no one. Turning back, I watched as he wandered off to lean against the marble wall, completely disinterested, as though I wasn’t even there.
“Well, don’t mind if I do,” I chuckled, striding forward. “Nice chat!”
He didn’t respond, seeming to go lifeless.
“Hey, statue boy, you in there?” I waved a hand in front of his face. Nothing. “Guess the lights are on, but nobody’s home,” I snickered. “Or maybe the lights are off, and nobody cares.”
Hmm... I was seriously suspecting I never actually respawned.
Shaking off the eerie stillness, I strutted through the gate, whistling a jaunty tune, my steps lively with anticipation. What new madness awaited me in this bizarre place? After all, who needs sanity when you've got an appetite for the absurd—and boy, was I famished.