HIS DARKNESS—IT RETURNED.

The theatre of death, of orbiting wrathraven wreckage, prodded at Swishy’s hyper-sensitivity to hurt.

Swishy, a sky-high straw warrior, stood amid the carnage that Bristles had left behind, the scavenged parts that the chasm now collected. He held his rake, gazing at its golden ends. Yet still he trembled—more nerves than panic, though.

Now that Swishy had a close look at the black hole, he didn’t have an immediate fear of it. The swirling negativity was like a living being more than anything, a jumbo-sized peeve, a malice pool.

But it was alive. Just alive. And for Swishy that somehow made it less scary.

It breathed. It moved the carnage-borne platforms like clouds, like winds, like a predictable and dependable clockwork.

The wrathravens submitted all that they were to the [Chasm], giving it life, giving it a strong dosage of autonomy.

Swishy’s body urged him to do the same, to pour resources into his cardiac abyss. His darkness clamored once more. The stores of inner blackness carbonated, it sizzled, it wanted to fight void with void.

Do it! Become dark again! Embrace your truest self!

“Shut up!”

I won’t!

“You will!”

But the shadows spoke with their wants, their varying hunger pangs. The crackling peeves shifted his straw aside, attempting to burst out.

The solitude in the sky burned him, it boiled him, it scalded through every hard-won ounce of control that he’d acquired.

Swishy dreaded this more than anything, the renewed prominence of his shadows, and the nagging feeling that he was heading for another an awful change. He chalked it up to leftover stress from the birdcage attempt. His soul hadn’t completely settled, a sensation he likened to other beings catching their breath.

Blackwheat crawled beneath his clothes. Those shadows were talking to him again, telling him to release the dark god again, to show the wrathravens what a real chasm looked like.

And that’s what scared him—he knew that if the peeves were encouraging him as opposed to telling him to submit, then his black potential was far greater than he ever anticipated.

Before the might of the wrathraven’s chasm, Swishy began to feel his unique abyss.

Inside, flowers of blackwheat crackled.

“It’s okay, it’s okay…” Swishy coached himself. “I can control it.”

He closed his eyes and evaluated his external problems.

Chasm winds whipped against Swishy’s gourd. Every time a gust blew toward him he swore he could hear the rock-like thunks against the side of his head. Darkness and debris, pollution and poison—everything served to distract him from the wrathravens’ true attack.

The dozens of [Ultimatum] spells conjured stakes all throughout the chasm, black flashes that he saw hidden in the murkiness, orbiting and orbiting, sharpening their points for Swishy. Each one had the presence of a blimp, immense enough to tear through Straw Guardian let alone the straw child.

Swishy was watched; Swishy was followed; Swishy was spiritually sniffed out through the skies by the [Ultimatum] stakes, waiting to impose their demands.

The concealed weapons laid in wait, settling into the ruinous infrastructure of the sky cemetery.

He had to clear this aerial stage and defeat the wrathravens. Even now, in the face of several [Ultimatum] spells, the wrathravens continued to feed Black Blasts into the [Chasm]. They grew their insurance policy while they knew Swishy had to contend with the obstacle course before him. The flock functioned as an engine, constantly feeding their failsafes fuel, mitigating the disaster of Swishy’s ability to turn situations around, to undo the world they’d built in favor of the straw god’s own.

The stakes in the sky…they seemed to smile. They even adjusted their shapes, curving into fangs. Next they grew thorns, splinters, and the spirals of smoky barbed wire.

The rake in Swishy’s hands caught the stray corruption, its gold flaming out into a dull ashen color—before stoking again with light.

But there was nothing more to say. The wrathravens unleashed their [Ultimatum] spells, a sprawling aura laced with unfavorable, unfair inquiries. Many of these occupied the gaps between the body-part platforms as added obstructions to Swishy’s sky-high parkour.

Loss or Loyalty? The wrathravens asked in multiple voices, thrumming, layered, echoing through the atmosphere and within Swishy’s gourd. The Ultimatum’s insistence triggered a ringing of his soul that he couldn’t shut out, an anxiety-driven tinnitus. Lose it all or be loyal to the beasts? The answer was obvious.

“Just give me the stupid stake—Loss.”

And so the stake came down, Swishy having dared the wrathravens. The boy took his chances and knew that he could dodge. His soul warmed, a secondary presence coating his body, an invader, a tracker.

A sudden tower of stake appeared meters from his head, casting its shadow over everything around him.

[Wing Jump]—Swishy launched from his current slab of wing straight into the oncoming stake. The barbed weapon swelled in darkness, whetting its lips from the Swishy’s offering of self.

Right at the moment of impact, Swishy activated a form of his straw pile technique: [Split]. He tore himself in two vertical pieces, the left side disconnected from the winged side. He softly split apart like oven-fresh bread while his head and wing dodged of their separate accords.

[Scarecrow]—his body reconvened with its after traveling around the ultimatum stake and landing upon a higher platform, another pallet of Bristles-reaped wings.

But as he reformed, the wrathravens sent [Black Blasts] to the anticipated location of his reconstruction.

The nimble boy wing-jumped away in the nick of time, dark flames licking his boot heels.

In mid-air, a wrathraven several meters away glared at him with intensity and clarity, its beaming red eye contact hitting him with an unblockable spell.

[Ultimatum]. Loss or Loyalty?

“I’ll lose it all then.”

A stake rained down but Swishy thought of wishwillows, he thought of sheer light, and he countered with an attack of his own.

[Luminous Strike]—the boy thrusted his rake toward the stake, the light-filled tines breaking down the sharpened tip. The black stake disintegrated all the way through, releasing ashen flakes into the air.

The boy jumped from platform to platform, now landing upon a disembodied set of open talons—but there were wrathravens, small ones, hidden behind each of the claws. The sprung through the fingers as vapors, revealing only their red, intent-bearing eyes.

[Ultimatum]—several times over.

The stakes appeared all at once, spring-loaded, anxious for Swishy’s answer—a tension that Swishy also felt inside his head. That was the horror of the spell, its automatic burden of mania even if the main question was somehow dodged. He clutched his gourd, doubled-over, and thought about how to avoid the crush of these towers.

There was no straw in the skies, no healing opportunities at present.

Trapped, the boy was trapped.

The wrathravens smiled, even gloated a bit.

It’s only proper to acknowledge the greatness of your masters. Praise us, our newest slave. We have set-ups for days. Now answer: Loss or Loyalty. The choice is yours—and the victory…is ours.

But Swishy held out, stubbornly suffering, writhing on discarded talon.

He realized then that this suffering was not his own. The feelings that influenced him came from the spell itself. His burden was artificially shuffled off to him. He studied the soulscape, considering the breath and function of these shadows.

Now that the spell was born, they were desperate for completion. Every spell was born of a wish, something to be instantaneously fulfilled. Nobody had explained this to Swishy, the wish-granting aspect of magic, but he’d understood this quite easily. Through straw, he’d created anything of himself and of the world that he so needed.

The [Ultimatum] stakes—as was all attack magic—were incomplete. The wrathravens’ technique was sentient, alive and uncertain, nervous, anxious for them to achieve completion. But once born they had to earn their wish-fulfillment. Like any living being, the spell contained souls that craved nothing more than to inflict themselves upon their target. The pain, the discomfort, the feedback of the targeted was something that they needed, that they fed upon—not out of sadism but out of necessity. A harmed being was how they knew that their purpose was completed.

The corruption was a form of completion, of wholeness—and he could even hear the audible relief of his body’s blackwheat then, the fulfilled curses receiving a reward for their diligence. Thus far, Swishy had only viewed the light as the only way to be fulfilled. That simply wasn’t the case. He knew from Wingy, from the feathers, from the abyssal heart condition that he’d lived with from the start.

For the first time, Swishy sensed the attack magic writhe. There was an agony, an anxiety that urged them forward. The stakes bulged at their tips, engorged with EMPTINESS.

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“Sorry, “ Swishy said. “You’re all just going to have to stay hungry. I can’t let you have me.”

The stakes stiffened at the sound of his Swish-speak, the slightly soul-tinged air of his language.

Loss activated—and the first stake plunged downward.

Swishy wing-jumped toward the attack and used a [Luminous Strike]. The light burned away the shadows. After halfway through the stake, he relaxed the light and found purchase onto the solid framework. Swishy climbed onto it, then grunted as the next [Ultimatum] demanded an answer.

“Loss! Now come!”

And so the next stake rained down. After a successful landing onto it, he triggered the next [Ultimatum]. Then the next.

He realized if he staggered his response to the different questions, he could control the timing of his enemy’s powerful and inevitable attacks. Swishy was relieved at figuring out some basic counterplay—but was worried nonetheless. He’d only found out how to barely survive because his enemies were so plentiful.

Swishy jumped from thorn to thorn, using his [Luminous Strike] as a grip as needed. Each of the thorns he’d deactivated joined the rest of the sky cemetery, floating along as an empty asteroid.

When Swishy looked around, the wrathravens were gone. They’d resumed hiding, actively avoiding his rake.

The boy sensed a trap. The wrathravens were only the minions in time. It was the environment that was the boss.

Quiet. A hush returned. Even the chasm gusts—while powerful—seemed to whisper. Something wasn’t right.

[Wing-Jump].

Swishy landed onto a new pallet of feathers, a whole wing drifting through space. The body parts situation made him nervous. Everything that comprised a wrathraven was alive in some way. He feared the dormant souls he walked upon. Nothing remained silent for long, not during times of magic and frenzy.

The scarecrow took careful steps, seeking the shadow snare, the pitfall, the quicksand.

Some of the platform surfaces began to swirl. His steps sounded like walking in puddles. The moisture was the red-flag, this he knew.

Swishy ripped a straw thread from his wrist and tossed it into the swirling.

Nothing.

Then he did so with a gold-straw one.

Slurp!

“A portal!”

One that ate the straw. The gold strand circled the drain, the whirlpool leading into who-knows-where. Maybe just abyss, maybe just a teleportation to the center of the [Chasm].

But when he looked back up—another ambush of eyes blared through the dark weather. Ultimatum remained the weapon of choice.

There was nothing he could do to prevent hearing the questions. Once he’d heard the Loss or Loyalty question aloud, the cadence stuck into his psyche, and that knowledge was what triggered the lock-on, the invasion into his soul.

He picked Loss and dodged the next thorn by jumping platforms—only to accidentally land upon a ‘puddle’. The moisture gripped around his ankle and dragged him inside. The whorling force of the rippling waters was akin to the wind, to a hurricane. He knew without a doubt that a portion of the [Chasm] lingered through that puddle trap and he had to release himself.

Now that he was caught, the two nearest wrathravens plunged toward him, baring their claws.

Swishy jammed his rake into the ground, diffusing the portal with light, loosening the shadowy grip through his dilution of the shadows. He wiggled his foot as the rake glowed.

Hurry, hurry, hurry…

His foot was freed.

But the wrathravens were in his face. The boy raised his rake and blocked the talon strike of one. The second was successful in grabbing him from behind, picking him up by his parka hood. Swishy embarrassingly dangled but kept a firm hold of his rake. The creature saw this as well and reached for it with one of its claws, its gaze rapt by the beauty. Even now, the gold was its highest priority, its intelligence circumvented by its animalistic wiring.

“Here,” Swishy held the rake out as a peace offering.

The beast clutched it, holding it in its talons in disbelief and rapture.

Other [Ultimatum] spells were still active, squeezing Swishy’s soul, forcing his answer. He waited until the beast soared over a landing spot, a puddle-less platform of feathers, and then answered every question at once.

“Loss, loss is all I know anyway!”

He hadn’t expected to get that dark with himself. Scarring of blackwheat slashed across his torso before he turned his attention to the skies again.

Seven stakes rained from above, piercing through the rake-obsessed wrathraven. While the beast was drilled through, vaporizing into more chasm-drifting anatomy, Swishy had deconstructed into a [Pile].

Both he and the rake drifted down to the aimed-for platform, a drifting wrathraven torso, lush with smoke and feathers. Swishy reformed his hand first and grabbed his weapon. A second hand was then made and he caressed it.

Then the rest of his body returned, dragging his parka and Timbs along for the ride.

Now a whole boy again, Swishy stared up at the [Chasm]. He’d gotten closer to the portal exit. And though he couldn’t see it, he knew he’d made progress since the massive abyss was that much larger.

More red eyes, more ultimatums, more invasive mental pressure.

“Loss, loss, loss!” Swishy impatiently yelled.

The torrent of stakes commenced.

And so too did the next round of straw acrobatics. As he ascended, he knew the portal was close. Because the chasm was all he could see. The wrathravens now had nowhere to conceal themselves. In their avoidance of Swishy, they’d backed themselves toward the chasm, their current selves revealed.

After giving their all to the chasm, to its obstacles, to the overall construction of the sky cemetery—they’d shrunken.

Some of the wrathravens were no larger than Sling’s pets. Their eyes were massive. Their magic was no less prominent. But their bodies didn’t contain nearly enough shadows to withstand any direct Swish-strike.

“Oh, you guys are cute now. I see, I see…” Swishy twirled his rake, a cocky spin-show to intimidate his enemies.

It worked.

The creatures were getting nervous. Their comments to each other couldn’t be hidden from the soul-sensitive boy.

He’s fast. He’s creative. He won’t go down easy. Just keep charging the chasm. Don’t panic. We’ll break him down and take his gold.

He’d never heard of them being self-conscious before, of being people-like, and he hated it. Swishy expected to feel guilty but only took in their nervousness. Now that the wrathravens had a taste of possible defeat, of doubt, they’d try even harder—which was the last thing that Swishy wanted.

[Wing Jump]—he launched himself into the thick of the darkness. Separate ultimatums began to encircle him, flying with the intention and intelligence of a real bird.

The wrathravens had gotten efficient with their casting, synthesizing their formula into demand plus consequence.

Gold-straw—or else. Service—or else. Your everything—or else. The things you hold most dear. The treasures of your life. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your best trait. The thing that makes you—you.

Or else.

The conjured stakes were smaller but they were able to cast faster, to cast simpler, and to concentrate on surveilling Swishy.

[Swish Cyclone]—he lowered his stance and performed a wide slash across the air with his rake, summoning a 360-degree gold arc around his body. The questions backed away from the aura, unable to maintain its darkness. But the shielding was temporary.

As the gold dissipated, the ultimatums floated back in, locked onto Swishy’s spirit.

The light, while a ward, also attracted the spells. There was no hiding, no true reprieve, for the scarecrow. He was forced to deal with the ultimatums one at a time. As the stakes gathered in the air, chasm energy spread toward them in tendrils, empowering them.

In the soulscape, the variety of ‘or else’ questions bloomed and bloomed, all on their separate timers, until they reached explosion.

The gourd pressure returned, the blue of his soul expanding, throbbing, demanding his answer to the question.

Your treasure—or else?

He thought about all that he treasured. The people, the birds, the trees, his miracles of straw. Everything he had he’d never give up.

“Or else!”

The stake appeared above him like a meteor and crashed downward.

Swishy jumped onto another pallet—while the one he’d just stood upon now crumbled from the ultimatum attack. The next questions were finishing their timer and so he primed the next [Swish Cyclone].

Pooft! Several times over, the ultimatums cashing in their psychic due all at once.

Your heart—or else.

A defiant hand gesture from Swishy signaled his instant ‘or else’ pick.

The stake rained down and Swishy dodged to another platform—but the collateral damage wasn’t just the platform this time. The attack continued through with laser-like speed and tore into Straw Guardian’s collarbone. A spray of blue bird feathers shot into the air.

“Are you okay!” Swishy screamed.

The birds just cacawed back. The disarray continued as the stake set flame to the guardian, spreading slowly, creeping toward the various nests.

When did the guardian get up there? Swishy wanted to know. He hadn’t been feeding the stake anymore. Perhaps the Straw Guardian became responsible for its growth. Or maybe another factor was at play here. There was so much the boy wanted to know—needed to know—but he wasn’t in the question-asking position at this time.

Another ultimatum popped and fizzled out.

A sudden lead ball weighed within Swishy’s gourd.

Another rejection of its request (Your soul).

Yet another stake.

The boy dodged and ascended, dodged and ascended, a chaotic pattern of destruction. The wrathraven body parts were demolished, the Straw Guardian caught occasional strays, and the znitches were fearing for their second lives, magic yet helpless.

Swishy scaled the creature-themed parkour of feathers and claws and talons.

And then, without warning, a [Black Blast] came straight for him. He ducked and the flame ball skimmed his gourd, only to boomerang back around through. The attack returned with the same speed and trajectory.

Swishy dodged it again.

Then those same blasts returned.

Both Swishy and the blast maintained this dance for several cycles until he jumped to another platform. He watched the blast move and move in the same pattern, automatically, as if it were influenced by mechanized gears.

And as he looked above at the rest of the [Chasm] playground to scale, he saw much of the same. The wrathravens were sending [Black Blasts] and [Wing Blades] into the black hole, and their intelligent spell used its gravitational energy to set the projectiles in the appropriate place.

It was another efficiency of the wrathravens, allowing their energy bursts to stick around. Nothing was wasted. Everything was recycled. Instead of throwing their energy away, they used them as building blocks to make Swishy’s life difficult.

Meanwhile, the wrathravens were patrolling Swishy’s progression. They didn’t attack him but they purposefully remained in his peripherals, always bothering him, always keeping him in his sights for a sudden projectile or even ultimatum.

It worked, too. Swishy was deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

Within the hush of Swishy’s stalking, he seized the opportunity and ascended as many levels as he could. Some of the platforms were feathers, others were talons in different poses—gripping and stabbing and standing with a strong and elegant calf. Other platforms were plumage sculptures and upper-body busts of the former owner of the feathers. The remaining traces of their souls established their image in place of their lost lives.

The more Swishy scaled, the artsier the atmosphere got. It was a museum of faces, of the death throes of his enemies.

He was unsettled but he didn’t feel badly for them. If he were Bristles he wouldn’t done the same to them—just without the glee.

And that’’s when he felt it—the straw giant’s chest.

Swishy felt his blackwheat gather over his torso, converging near his heart. [Ache] was a useful spell—and a scary one. In real time he felt the progression of gloom advance toward the heart chamber.

Trey! The boy knew better than to panic. But he couldn’t help it. The negativity seeped through him, the spillage of which caused his arms to produce three or four bruisings of blackwheat.

He knew he was running out of time. Even though he’d launched himself into this wrathraven boss stage, knowing that the znitches and Trey were in danger. Now those perils were becoming real, the accrued corruption of the guardian spreading through Swishy’s body, concentrating mostly on his chest.

His torso felt as if it were being burned through, the wrathravens aiming to claw his best friend out.

“Trey!” Swishy called.

And the wrathravens simply laughed.

Down below, the body parts of the sky cemetery slid away like opened doors. The sea of destruction parted to allow for its latest addition of furniture.

“Oh no!”

Straw Guardian rose into the lair, gravely dark. It levitated toward the chasm, a flying scarecrow, its stake cut away.

Inside, the znitches cowered, peeking through the straw weaves.

Meanwhile, a cluster of wrathravens rose with the giant, surveilling the birds, gleefully soaring around at its monument of prisoners.

Swishy focused on the battle, on saving everyone, resisting the temptation to check beneath his clothes. [Ache] made him throb all over, a festival of blackwheat sneaking upon him. But he didn’t want to check. He didn’t want to know.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the guardian.

But the giant merely drooped its head, drawing toward the heart of the chasm.