Inside my cage, I laid on my side and stared into the dark, thinking about all the things I did wrong. There was no bright side to any of this. I hadn't been captured for a noble cause, I hardly believed in such things. Instead, I had been brought down by hubris.

Refusing to go back to the ocean, I traveled by land knowing the risks. The territories I went through were owned by someone else. And, although I could slip between the cracks in some places where they were wider than others, I hadn't kept my head low like I promised Terrance. I'd run headlong into disaster.

The Crystal had been too great a temptation. Between my resentment and the Power it offered, I had considered it my right to steal. Even after I told myself I was no thief, these people were terrorists and murderers, I thought. They deserved it, for all the damn trouble they'd given me. They all deserved it.

Yet, it was me who suffered now. And I feared for what came next. I had come to understand that any real pain on my part meant something was wrong. My Power would respond with an adaptation, but what would it change? The decision had been mine.

I had wanted to prove to myself that I could go by land. Then, I had wanted to prove to Mary that she under-estimated me. It was my fragile ego that had shrouded my sight of the path. Still, I hated them. Even more, now that my Power turned its gaze towards its user. 

It was a familiar feeling. If only these people would just leave me alone.

With everyone everywhere I went, it was nothing but trouble. Their little worlds frantically lashed out at that which refused to be controlled. There could be no peace without satisfaction for the mob.

Peace was the object of mutually selfish cooperation. The minute someone existed but stopped being a benefit, I knew, people would lash out. Just breathing their air without serving a purpose was cause enough. Nobody actually cared about others' freedom. Ha! Maximal was right. Every ounce of personal freedom had to be sanctioned, lest it cost the mob. They only pretended to value freedom because such politics benefitted themselves.

I shook my head. The stress was pounding behind my eyes. These thoughts were alien, and they caused me to shake. The stress only ratcheted up, but it wasn't me doing it this time. Not like in the Labyrinth. This was my Power itself, demanding more.

"It's violence that's the default. It's death that's the default," I coughed, the words coming out against my will. Coming from the pain in my chest.

The chasm was yawning open inside me, and through it, I could hear the waves churning. I could smell the lilies in the hot sun and see the ripples of wind cut through the grassy planes.

Every failure exacted a price, and the payment was death.

I could practically hear Hickory's paternalistic admonishment. "Thus are the wages of sin, Child." His soul felt like ants crawling beneath my skin. His and many more. 

The vision I was having tried to tell me something, but I didn't want to hear it. This was too dark an abyss for me to gaze into. I wasn't ready for another change. Not after giving up my dream to sail, in favor of being a monster in the woods. Too much had been asked of me already. Too much demand was being placed on me to change. Too much anxiety, screaming for more. Always more.

Even though I was in prison, what was worse was the pain of knowing it was my fault.

Finally, I gained the strength to sit up in my cage and look around. I could barely see with my night vision through the dark. I could make out my clawed hands, but the rest of the image of my body came via my Power's account.

The designs which the cells took for themselves came from the invisible channel. There, they peered into natural selection's long distant possibilities, and the Power met whatever need arose. They did not reason out the right designs. No, this was something else entirely. The designs came as surely as gravity pulling water through the twists and turns of a ravine. Always to its proper form in the basin.

It was my Power's access to the principle of life. The inevitability of a solution came without intent or consciousness. Achieved purpose without will.

And the purpose was the nature of any solution. Like a lock without a key, one was not created without the other. With all the Power of the Crystal coursing through me, I had been faced with a choice, then. The dilemma of any living thing under threat. Fight or flight. That had been my challenge.

With Mary standing right beside me, I knew, if I had attempted to abandon ship and escape to a smaller form, she would catch me. Her flurry of a million crows couldn't be under-estimated.

I had seen only one way out, then, and my body had responded to achieve it. Every inch of me was covered with impenetrable, layered armor. With joints weaved in a bendable fiber stronger than spider's silk. My muscles grew and crushed out complexity to become more like hydraulic machinery than flesh. I had become the ultimate fighter, honed by billions of years of evolution in only moments. A naturally bio-engineered creature. And yet, it could all be taken away with a touch.

The Conquistador drained the life from me with his Power. There was no doubt in my mind that he infused the Crystal with what he stole in order to create it. I figured, the vitality taken from unwilling victims was just so fitting for a tyrant.

Everything people built was stolen. Whether plants or animals, they devoured the work of others, and life took useable energy from the environment, turning it to waste. They thought they were improving it, but they didn't deserve the raw materials they ruined.

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"See?" the flesh told me. "Don't you see?"

I tried to ignore the voice coming out of the deep. I didn't have the heart to try escaping yet, let alone have my Power tearing at my psyche. That was what it was doing, I realized. The one part of me that it couldn't directly change, it tried to manipulate.

Suddenly, that thought really began to sink in, and it had my hands shaking under the weight of it.

Hurting those men in the bar hadn't bothered me. All this time, my Power had been removing my sense of empathy. All this time, I had laughed to myself dismissively about it. Even as I had wanted to hurt people and hunt. Children and the elderly. When I was hungry or just bored, the urge hit me naturally, like the need to run when I came upon an open clearing.

And all the while, my strength had been growing. My morals decayed. I became increasingly selfish, and I had no plan nor will to stop it. And with every time the voice spoke to me, I took one step closer to believing in nothing but my own Power. That was what it wanted. For me to have a psyche devoid of humanity, willing and capable of doing anything. Because there was still just one line I refused to cross.

I refused to kill.

"I don't even know if I want to stop you," I said, feeling it watching me. It was judging my thoughts. Seeing how it wanted to change them. "But I'm not a bad person. I won't let you make me one. I won't let you change my understanding of right and wrong, just so you can get what you want. I don't care if biology thinks it's nonsense, I won't intentionally cause unnecessary harm to people. It's not necessary!"

"You must be free," the voice said. As it showed itself, I could sense its entire presence, looming over my body and intentionally causing the angst I felt.

"All this time, I've been running from other people's control so that I could be free. But you've been using that freedom against me. Trying to make it so I don't know who I am. Why?"

"You are never free from your nature. Only from the domination of parasites. Your freedom is the uncovering of a light that must shine, not the survival of a particular and weak mind. Freedom is to succumb to the universal will for Power."

The channel couldn't give me energy, only information. It couldn't help me feel any better when that would mean leaving me alone. It wanted me to suffer now, for the mistakes I made, and for the greater good of my future self. So that I would become someone who failed and suffered less from weakness.

It wanted me to break and change so that I could be better according to its designs. But I repeated my question. "Why? Who are you, speaking to me? No Power is sentient on its own, so what the hell are you?"

It made me understand. It answered in one word, and in that word came a vision and a warning. It told me not to judge the Conquistador, or to resent. "All of life in this world belongs to you. Everything it does is according to our design, and our design is perfect. Lament not for the loss of your own life or any life, for loss is your design." It showed me what it meant.

In the darkness of my cage, I could see the stars at once. The universe opened up to me in a dazzling array of sights. Galaxies spun open to paint multicolored works of art, swirling through the void. Black holes, even, did not mar the beauty, as they bent light and dark into a perfect clash. Every planet, star, moon, and asteroid was independent, yet worked together somehow. Everything no longer seemed like chaos then, but a perfectly unified effort towards one singular goal. The word that my power had whispered in my ear. The thing that it wanted to prove to me.

"Order is your deal with the devil," I whispered. "But it's only a means to an end. Is this what you are?" All the pieces fell together. My consciousness had existed in the channel, but only as a temporary place of storage when I was without a body. It had to preserve it, because it could not be sure of what a threat truly was without my rational mind to interpret it. Mere pain was not enough. Pain could be hormesis. Evil was abstract.

Yet, my own subconscious wielded the Power as well, and its desires had formulated a question. This voice to which I spoke was the solution. It was not me, but the design my Power had created for a man beyond my suffering. Just as forms for wings or claws came out of the nothingness like apparitions of the future, this personality was meant to replace my petty psychological flaws. My goddamn morals. 

The flesh spoke to me, and its name was Ego.

"Nothing you do can stop it," he said, sounding strange. "With time, whatever can happen, must happen. With time, this moment was fated. You and I are one." His voice changed. It was no longer a chorus, but a single man. A very familiar man, glory in his sovereign proclamations.

I could only resist the adaption, bringing violent spasms through my body. "You're not inevitable," I said. "I still exist. And as long as I'm in charge, I won't lay down and die."

The cells were already changing. Finally, their desired form was taking its rightful position. I simply had to stop holding on, and the change happened. They wanted this from the beginning; to overwrite the last of my humanity so that nothing limited our development.

My Power might not have been conscious. But just like evolution, it didn't need to be, to desire fitness.

In my vision, I had seen stars turn to iron orbs. Black holes evaporated over unfathomable timespans. The truth was, life made no exception to this. We weren't the defiers of entropy with our order, I knew. It was entropy that created us and entropy that we served. Every. Single. Event.

"Yes, it is your choice," he said, solemn. "But any choice is inevitable with enough suffering. That's what the infinite torment of hell is, boy. God's guiding hand to redemption. And what comes out? Always something glorious."

"Consume," I said. "That's what you told me. But I don't need that to be happy. I don't need to hurt other people to reach my potential!" 

I released my breath as I stretched out each limb as hard as possible, trying to steady them. 

"Long live the Ouroboros," he laughed, and I heard the sound come from my own mouth. He was taking control of my body.

I pounded against the vault door of my cage, creating a deep dent in the steel. "You c-can try to torture me into letting you win, b-but you can't kill me. Not as long as I hate you... more than I fear death."

I had chosen to fight. My Power might have decided what a stronger self looked like, but I didn't have to agree. With the control I had gained in the Labyrinth, I could stop it using my rational mind. I could believe that the greater threat was abstract. I could stand by my morals, to the end.

"You won't escape this place without me," it spoke through me, no longer gaining territory, but keeping its presence in half my brain. "Your morals keep you from killing. They have repressed your greatest ability yet. The one you used to kill in the past. Without me, you will never reach your full potential."

Slowly, the shakes dissipated from the tips of my fingers. I became steady, but my head was on fire. It ached worse than anything I had experienced before, and my Power did nothing to dampen it. It actually caused and increased it. Yet, I didn't relent. "I'm going to find a way out of this prison, and I'm going to do it without you."

"We will see..."