All that existed was the fog. Billowing plumes of white cast eternal in every direction. profuse regions of impenetrable mist suffused some areas, while in others, the vapours thinned to a phantom haze. Yet the fog filled the vast expanse, drifting out to clasp even the furthest reaches. Like a raging river, the mist flowed from infinity feeding into infinity. Its currents were never static; one moment, a dense, ivory tide surged left, in the next, it tore right, only for the current to change again. Spiralling diagonally, it wove into thrice-entwined helices, carving paths upward through the endless cloud.
Floating within the fog, Havoc extended a hand, watching as thin wisps of pale white peeled away from the boundless sea. They drifted toward him, slipping into his arm as though he were nothing more than an illusion.
He should have felt something—anything—but he did not. No fear, dread, excitement, or even wonder. Like an overturned cup, he was empty and clear. Content, he drifted with the tide, heading toward wherever it would take him.
Images flashed in his mind. He could vaguely sense they once mattered. He saw himself upon a wooden platform, kneeling before a baying crowd calling for his death. Some of the faces seemed familiar. He may have known them once; his memory was hazy, blurred like an overcast night. It was hardly important now. Perhaps it never was.
His thoughts turned to a vast and empty chamber. Therein, he had raced against decaying stars. His mind shifted again, giving way to a clash of steel and claw. As he recalled the scene, he could only guess at the cause of his frantic exertion. The struggle was needless; Surely, even then, he must have known at worst he would die.
Drifting back and forth, he watched as his life played out before his eyes. He witnessed struggle, trial, and tear, straining to grasp their significance. It did not matter, none of it did. He dwelled within impenetrable fog; like the mist, he too was unburdened by the weight of the world.
Scene after scene—face after face—they flared fleeting in his imagination, failing to ignite his interest. If there was ever a spark, it was extinguished without notice by the sea of swirling mist. He could not tell if his eyes were open, but he stopped watching, allowing his memories to wash over him. Like the tide over sand—frothing forward to retreat without trace—all that was lost was never meant to last.
Tendrils of mist pulled loose from his body like string, drifting into the surroundings. As each wisp wafted free, it became more difficult to hold onto his thoughts, fogging the line between person and place, dispelling the illusion of ego.
His identity was not alone in its erosion. As he drifted, he grew fainter, the substance of his body fading more and more with every passing moment. A part of him—the dwindling self that could still sense the wrongness of it all—screamed out in desperation. Consigned to the borders of his collapsing mind, its cry was too distant—it could not reach where he had been carried. Adrift in forever, the edges of himself were slipping away. It would not be long before he would be lost completely.
‘Take your brother and hide!’ Whether his eyes were closed—he could not say—they flung wide open.
He was barely a child when they came. Torches raised, they had burned down his world. They put to the sword every man and child; all that was to take was plundered. To leave nothing behind was their goal—not even his innocence.
Warm, sticky iron flooded his mouth when he gnawed the hand, his sister had held tight over his mouth. Tears streaked up, trailing his temples, and wetting his scalp, as he stared through the floorboards. His father’s blood seeped through splintered wood, anointing his head as his father bled dry. Wrestling against his sister’s trembling hold, he watched helplessly as they gripped his mother’s hair and dragged her across the floor. Slashing her own throat, she defied them in the end. Not everything precious could be taken by force.
The acrid choke of the swelling inferno clung to the back of his throat as he recalled the night. Never before had the details been so clear. In the past, when he thought back, he could remember fire, aimless fury, and little else. His vision gave his rage direction, for he remembered a man.
Dressed in black robes, threaded by the seams in a criss-cross of silver, the man who murdered his parents had strolled out his front door, turned, and smiled back at the life he had left in ruins. His hair shone crimson, and a scar vertically down from his left eye, curving across his chin.
Havoc did not know who he was, nor did he know where he was. But now he knew his face. Whatever the cost, he was going to find him. When that day came, he would reach down the bastard’s throat, and tear out his rotting bowels.
As though responding to his sweltering rage, the white void began to tremble. No longer did the fog flow like a river; rather, it burst violently, like an erupting volcano. Vaporous geysers careened skyward, detonating the endless heavens, raining wisps back down. In every direction, the phenomenon repeated until countless, intangible threads weaved through the misty expanse. The wisps coalesced above Havoc. They spiralled entwine, twisting like tight rope, then descended. Piercing through Havoc’s chest, his ghostly form shuddered, as he felt return what had drifted away, gaining substance and solidity until he was whole once more.
The weight of the world perched down upon his shoulders. It was his to burden—not to be taken. Though he had never weighed a human heart, he knew he was owed a pound of flesh. Once he carved it from the scarred man’s chest, he could always return the difference.
But first, he needed to escape the void.
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As if responding to his thoughts once more, the clouded expanse began to flow anew. It surged forward like a wave, crashing down into billowing seas of white. When the mist settled and thinned, illusory structures took shape. Towering buildings, and winding roads bloomed all around. In the distance, mountains erupted from the mist, peaking high above the rapidly forming city. Surrounding the emerging city, vast stretches of towering mushrooms sprouted, casting shadows over the tallest spires at the borders of the city. Even reduced to an ephemeral exhalation, the city and the boundless forest surrounding were awe-inspiring.
Had he a heart in his chest, or lungs beside them—breath-taken—his pulse would have thrummed at the sight. Not only from its majesty, but because of its familiarity. He had seen the forest, and tread beneath its radiant growth. And though the city he had walked was in ruins, there was no mistaking the towering architecture, and broad roads for anything other than the City of Monsters—that cursed and dreadful place from which he had just fled.
This is the Dungeon Cell… he thought, battling to reconcile the shining cityscape with the haunting memories of chaos and decay.
He hovered over the city as the dwindling patches of barren land filled with houses, temples, and high places. When the city was complete, its people emerged from the mist. A lively throng, they strolled down avenues, streets, and alleyways. Some walked upon two legs, others slithered, while others still glided above the ground, carried by the wind upon feathered wings. Their features were clouded. Composed as they were of wavering vapours, Havoc could only make out their impression, yet of every manner of living beings inhabiting the city, not one of them was human.
He looked down from above to see gelatinous tentacles slip through loose sleeves within market stalls, wrapping tight around a bulbous fruit more voluminous than his head. Paying the vendor, the tendrils pulled back, and circular coins fell atop the market-stall, soundlessly stirring mist as they danced upon the surface. Elsewhere, two broad-shouldered shapes, wielding curved blades in their six arms, faced each other and bowed. They then clashed swords, gliding across an empty field, witnessed only by the slender form of another of their kind.
The tapestry of life, vibrant and abundant, unfolded wherever Havoc looked. But when he looked again, he was somewhere different.
He could not say how, nor could he be certain of when, but in one moment, he had watched wondrous sights from above, in the next, he was among them. He imagined that in its true form, the courtyard where he found himself—lush with fungi as thin as grass—would have glowed with vibrant hues.
Great mushrooms, lined side by side, enclosed the plaza, framing the fungal grass in a neat rectangle. On one side, the mushrooms gave way to a stone-slated path, trailing toward a dome. Colossal in its architecture, alone, the structure could have comfortably sheltered thousands. Thick veins twisted over the dome, from its base to its peak, pulsing as though serpents entwined.. Even as a wisp of itself, it was altogether enchanting.
‘The seers, our soothsayers, and all our wise men agree,’ a sombre feminine voice intoned. ‘This world is doomed.’
Beneath a canopy stretching dozens of yards, creatures sat, stood, slithered, or hovered over ground in a circle. Invisible to their sight, Havoc stood among them.
‘Then all is lost,’ said the blurred form of a being standing on eight legs, his voice weighing heavy with defeat. From the shoulders down, the being appeared as a man, but its bare and muscular waist melded seamlessly into the abdomen of a spider. Its appearance was inhuman, but far from unsightly. The hybrid bore a silent nobility in its fearful asymmetry.
Every creature beneath the canopy was woven with such strange, wondrous intricacy, evoking a desperate longing from within to understand the immortal hand or eye capable of conceiving such lifeforms. But of all the life shimmering bright even while shaped of cloud, none shone brighter than the serpent. Even devoid of colour, she was incandescent. Her face carried the slight plump of childhood youth, softening her features with sweet innocence. Her chest was bare, yet her feminine impression evoked only the warmth of a babe comforted in his mother’s embrace. Her slender and naked waist curved down into a serpent’s tail, patterned with diamond shaped scales reaching down to the tip. Splendour was the ghost of the serpent—ten thousand sonnets would never suffice. Yet despite her beauty, her image was tainted, overlaid with that of a future already lost.
The Temptress… Havoc had seen her vision before. Though it felt a lifetime ago, not even a week had passed since he plunged the Buried Strike between her chest and consumed the faint, crackling glow from her sparking corpse.
‘We must not give in to despair!’ The Temptress’ voice, steeped in passion, commanded the attention of all.
‘But what can we do against the folly of the gods?’ Asked one of the females. Face raised, she held out her six arm in a display of surrender.
All eyes cast down, their collective silence heavy with unspoken defeat. The silence lingered as though a spell, before shattering under the stomp of heavy feet, and the defiant roar of a tusked, muscle-bound male dressed in flowing robes.
‘I won’t stand by and watch my children fall to the befoulment! My freedom, my life, my very soul—I will gladly surrender, but not my family! Never my family!’
His outburst drew the focus of the gathering, but their gazes fell heavily on his barrelled chest, not one daring to meet his eyes. Whether out of fear, shame, or despair, none found the strength to lift their heads.
A murmur rippled through the circle before one voice rose above the others. ‘We all admire your passion, Dhalthantum. But where can you succeed where even the elder Eternarchs, father of the Innocents, the firstborn of their kind, have failed?’
‘We shall succeed because we will not surrender.’ The Temptress interjected. ‘We shall succeed because there is hope.’
As though lightning surged from one to the next, the crowd’s murmurs swelled, their movements alive with renewed energy.
‘What is this hope you speak of?’ The eight-legged creature asked, his voice laced with reticent longing.
‘The spirts.’ the serpent replied. ‘Our only hope lies with the spirits.’
In the centre of the gathering, the mist began to swirl, whipping into a furious vortex. A hooded figure stepped out from the eye of the storm. It walked unseen among the phantom creatures, letting its black, shrivelled fingers trail through their vapours before stopping to stand before Havoc. Beyond the hood, Havoc could only see the gleam of a smile.
It can see me? Havoc’s mind raced, alarm gripping him as it dawned on him that, unlike the others, the figure was not shaped of mist. It had substance and form, alien to the clouded void.
‘I wouldn’t miss this part,’ the figure said, its voice hauntingly soft as bright amber eyes flared into sight. ‘Havoc, my boy. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’