Everything went black; not dark but black. I couldn’t see anything at all; I couldn’t smell anything, and the only thing I could feel was the sense of falling. Kind of like when you first fall asleep, sometimes you’ll feel like you’re falling and wake up in a panic, only I wasn’t waking up. I wondered if I was dead; I can’t tell you how long I fell. When you’re falling into nothingness with no perception, the passage of time gets… distorted. Maybe it was an hour, or maybe it was five days, but regardless of how long it was, I never got hungry or thirsty, and at one point I even realized I wasn’t breathing. Suddenly, I realized I couldn’t feel the air moving past me; was I in a vacuum? Then I heard something very faint; it was very startling to sense something after so long of nothing. I couldn’t make out what it was at first, but after a few moments, I identified the sound. It was laughter. Not joyous laughter or even comedic laughter but malicious laughter. It grew louder, and louder until I finally hit something: a liquid. Not water, something thick like oil. I tried to swim back to the surface in a panic when I realized it didn’t matter; apparently, I didn’t have to breathe, but even if I did, no matter how I struggled, I couldn’t direct my motion. The liquid got thicker and thicker until I couldn’t move at all, and then someone turned the lights back on. I was inside a sphere of some transparent “liquid” (it was more of a solid now,) and the sphere was in the hands of a giant humanoid figure; the only source of light was his glowing red eyes. I couldn’t make out any details of the entity, but somehow, I could sense something about it: it was pure evil.
“So, we finally meet little human. For years, I thought you were inconsequential; I didn’t even bother probing your thoughts or feelings and just bided my time in slumber waiting for your death. You mortals live and die in the blink of an eye, but you awoke me.” Its voice reverberated as if it was coming from all directions, and it was so deep it rattled my very essence. It also spoke as if English weren’t its first language. It paused occasionally like it was searching for the right word.
“When I learned about my mother’s death,” I somehow spoke without breath in a sudden revelation. All of that anger, that rage I felt wasn’t mine. It was this… thing’s.
“Very good!” it shouted with a chuckle. “I started looking in on you periodically after that, and to my delight, you discovered your pneuma, and even more you weren’t half bad for a mortal.” What the fuck was this thing talking about? It’s lived inside of me? For how long? My whole life? And it’s been watching me??
“In fact, I’m going to ensure you become strong. You might have already realized it: a pressure on your soul, something pushing against you? Consciously or not, you’ve been diverting a bit of your power to push back.” I had realized that; I thought it was all in my head, but occasionally, it felt like I didn’t have access to all of my pneuma. Part of it had to be left in reserve to protect me from… something. “Struggles are what strengthen you,” it continued. Even though I couldn’t see its face, I could tell it was smiling.
“You probably have a lot of questions which I will answer in time. For now, I’m going to give you a gift: a small fraction of my power. Use it well.”
That was the first time I met the monster that lives inside me. Did that sound poetic? I didn’t mean it to; I’ve had to live with the awareness of that abomination in the depths of my soul whispering things inside my mind and secretly manipulating my emotions for over a decade.
Suddenly, I opened my eyes, and I was in the arena again. What’s more, I could see; it’s as if my whole life I’d had a blindfold on, and for the first time in my life, I took it off. I looked toward Neil; he had created another earth wall to defend against my fireball, and it mostly succeeded though it was crumbling. Something weird was happening though: I could see straight through the earth wall at Neil huddling behind it still bleeding. Furthermore, I could see the arcane energy that had left his body to become earth energy in the wall, and most disturbingly, I could see through Neil. It’s difficult to explain, but I could see the him inside of him; I could see his very soul. Don’t ask me how I could see things that occupy the same space, but somehow, I could. I learned later that people’s souls usually look more or less like their physical bodies, but sometimes a little distorted. For instance, an anorexic’s soul will look much larger than they actually do, a narcissist’s soul will look larger than life, etc. Neil’s soul looked strong and powerful but not arrogant, righteous but not judgmental. I can’t explain it, but I could tell what kind of a person he was just from his soul. A gust of wind blew past me, and I could see the wind energy had once been arcane energy, and I could see the trail that led back to Emma; she was using the wind to gently land on the ground. When I looked at Emma, I was shocked. Her soul looked like a scared little girl; she was gripping her knees tightly against her chest and crying. That was when I learned Emma’s tough-guy (tough-girl?) exterior was to hide some deep-seated insecurities. I very intentionally tried no to look down at myself; I didn’t want to see my soul. I did, however, feel the icicle that was still embedded into me. I felt no pain at all; in fact I felt great. I was strong: not just physically, but I also had a huge excess of pneuma. I felt like I could do anything; I gripped the icicle to pull it out of me, and I saw my reflection in the ice. My eyes were glowing red, and my pupils had been reduced to slits. It looked like I had cat eyes, and I saw what I was afraid of: my own soul. My image looked haggard like I hadn’t slept in weeks… and had a burgeoning meth problem. What’s more, inside the soul was a black mass like a tumor, and it had tendrils like veins that stretched throughout the interior of the soul. Even more concerning, they were growing. Penetrating more and more of my reflection in real time. I closed my eyes to no avail; I could see through my eyelids. With a grunt of frustration, I looked away from the ice and pulled it out of me; it hurt, but the feeling was distant and untroubling. As I discarded the icicle, I turned my head back and saw my wound close, healing by itself.
I then turned to Emma; she was looking at me wide-eyed and full of tears. “Dante….” she muttered under her breath.
“What? Do you know what’s happening to me??” I asked her hopefully. She shut her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” She lifted her sword into an attack position and launched toward me with a barrage of blows from all directions. In an instant, I summoned my sword and blocked them all easily. Normally, I couldn’t keep up with her speed, but now, it was like she was moving in slow motion. With her strikes ineffective, Emma tried a different tactic: she jumped backward 10 feet and raised both hands, orange sigils appearing in front of each one. I could have stopped her, but I just let it happen. She summoned the same white-hot three foot long fire ball I had used before and launched it at me. This was the biggest spell I had ever seen her perform even if it did require two hands. I could have brought up my shield; with the power flowing through me, I was positive it would have survived the onslaught, but that would have been a purely defensive move. It was time I moved to offense. I lifted my arm using a blue sigil this time, and a 50 foot tall wave appeared in front of me. I should probably explain something here: there’s two types of elemental magic: one where the caster uses the elements around him (like lifting a boulder on the ground or creating a breeze in the air,) and one where the caster creates the element out of nothing. Obviously, the second is much harder to pull off; the difficulty lies in how much mass is created. In the case of air (creating an air bubble in water for instance) or creating a flame where there was none, it’s pretty easy as both air and the plasma that makes up fire have very little mass. Water and especially earth are much more difficult though. I didn’t create all of the water in the wave; I pulled most of it out of the air, but there wasn’t enough, so I had to generate most of the wave. Even in my super-charged state with all of this extra pneuma within me, this spell took a lot out of me; if I had to do it one maybe two more times, I’d pass out.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
The wave was so high, it towered over the edge of the arena. If left unchecked, a lot of the spectators were about to get wet. Luckily for them, when the fireball hit the water, it was instantly vaporized every drop. In an anime when this kind of thing happens, the water is just gone, and the fight could continue, but this wasn’t an anime. As the two struck each other, scorching steam shot out in all directions; it was the kind of hot that could burn flesh or blind someone. With a wave of my hand and a quick sigil, I covered myself in a gust of wind blowing all of the steam away from me before I could face any effects. The steam was so thick, there’s no way Emma could see where I was, but with my new eyes, I could see her. She had activated her shield, but the steam was so hot, it was burning straight through it. As the steam began to dissipate, I determined, her shield had just enough left to survive, so I needed to stress it. Taking a page from Neil’s playbook, I ripped a chunk of the earth out of the ground and launched it at Emma. The boulder shattered her shield into pieces, but before it could hit her, she jumped on top of it while the remaining steam burned her skin. I readied another boulder when with a flash of blue, a lightning bolt ripped through the space between us and launched me backward, electrocuting me.
“Are you even Dante anymore?” she asked as she shakily stood back up.
“NOOOO!” I screamed both in my head and out loud. With my eyes shut tight, I fell to my knees, put my hands over my ears, and shouted, “You’re not going to turn me into a fucking monster. Get out of my head!” I could feel it more easily now: my own pneuma as well as… its. There was a force pushing against me as if it was trying to force more of its power into my very soul. I imagined my pneuma as a dam against a nearly infinite body of water; the power he was filling me with was water spilling over the top of dam. I could sense it so clearly now: the energy and corruption flowing into my arms, my legs, my nerves,… and especially my eyes. With an effort of will, I made the dam taller and thicker, and cut off every bit of that thing’s pneuma flowing into me. It felt real, like the dam was a physical location preventing the red sea of power from flowing into my soul. Suddenly, its voice stopped; furthermore, my emotional state calmed. Not only was it trying to control me directly, it was controlling me indirectly with my feelings. When I reopened my eyes, my vision was back to normal. Solid objects were solid, I couldn’t see energy, and souls were no longer visible. I smiled and stood back up when a wave of dizziness hit me. I fell to the ground, and the last thing I saw was Emma looking over me.
“Are you… you?” she cried with her sword held to my neck, and then everything went black.
I woke up a few hours later in The Krymmeno’s infirmary with Emma and Neil beside me.
“Hey, man,” Neil said. “We passed!”
“Uhh, what?” I asked groggily.
“We’re officially members of the Gnosilepides!” he replied. Emma and I made eye contact, and she looked concerned.
“That’s great,” I replied without much enthusiasm. “Could you get me a glass of water please?”
“Yeah, sure. Quinn wants to talk to you too,” he said as he left the room. I looked at Emma.
“What do you know?” I asked coldly. She had some awareness of what happened to me; I could see it in her eyes.
She paused a minute before replying. “I don’t know anything; we were fighting, and everything was normal when one minute I felt an immense power radiating off of you. It’s like you weren’t in your body anymore, and what had replaced you felt… malevolent, even evil.”
Like an idiot, I believed her. “I don’t know what happened, but there was something in my head; no, in my soul. It granted me power, but it also tried to control me.”
Remembering my icicle inflicted wound on my side, I felt my torso, but there was nothing there. My shirt had holes on either side, but my flesh was unblemished. “Did the druids heal me?” I asked hoping my Wolverine impression was some kind of fever dream.
Emma looked at me with sadness in her eyes, “I think you know they didn’t. Whatever has infected you wants you to live.”
“I just want it gone!” I shouted.
“I’m afraid that will be impossible,” a gravelly voice said behind me. I turned around to see Quinn walk into the room. “Emma, would you excuse us? And please make sure we aren’t interrupted.”
“Of course, archmage,” she said leaving the room and closing the door.
I won’t bore you with the whole conversation, but here’s the gist: Quinn knew since I was born this was a possibility. My mother died while she was pregnant with me fighting Eric Manthei, the leader of the demonologists that had decimated the Gnosilepides over a decade earlier. Apparently, Manthei had summoned a demon from hell which he invited into his own soul: in other words, he was possessed shitty horror movie style. Even worse, it wasn’t just any demon but an archdemon. I guess now would be a good time to describe hell; no living mortal has ever been to hell (at least not and come back,) but the order collected a great deal of data on hell by talking to demons and other entities which know of it. There are seven levels of hell each progressively worse than the next. In other words, the first level of hell is the worst, then the second, etc. all the way up to the seventh. When a human dies, their sins are evaluated, and the resting place of their soul is determined. If the human was basically good, they’ll go to heaven; otherwise, they’ll go to hell, and the more numerous or hurtful their sins are, the deeper into hell they’ll go. Demons can only make their way to earth if a demonologist summons them; in principle, they are banned from the mortal plane, but they can still be invited in. It takes a great deal of power to pull something out of hell, so usually only the weakest demons can be summoned. The weakest demons are what used to be human souls corrupted by the tortures of hell; those aren’t the only things that live in hell though. There are also archdemons: creatures native to hell, and it was one of these creatures from the first level of hell, the deepest part that Manthei had taken into himself.
When my mother fought him, most of him had dissolved into the demon, and even his appearance had turned monstrous. Her soul sword was not able to pierce the thing’s flesh, but with her dying breath, she dug deep inside of her… and into me, her unborn child, to reinforce her sword and puncture Manthei’s heart. Maybe it was an accident and maybe it wasn’t, but either way she drew my soul out of my body and used it as a weapon. They both died soon after; Quinn hoped that would be the end of him and the archdemon, but it had attached itself to the sword and slithered its way into my soul. In the 17 years before I learned of its existence, it had entrenched itself within me so any exorcism would be lethal or at the very least it would shred my soul to pieces on the way out leaving me a shell of my former self. I had a new job I never signed up for: I had to be the gatekeeper to this archdemon. I needed to refuse its power regardless of what happened, or it would eventually turn me into a monster just as it had done with Manthei. I asked Quinn about the sight the demon had afforded me; it’s called democculus: demonic vision. Demons see things for what they really are; they can see mortals’ souls and the bare energy that composes the universe. A very useful talent, but one I was forbidden to use.