In the darkness, something tingled in the back of Joe’s head. His control slipped just for the briefest moment allowing his racing thoughts to sprint out in many different directions, nearly giving him a headache.
Joe tried to refocus, to stop himself from spiraling in the void, to latch onto that feeling and not on what might be lurking in the impenetrable darkness.
Something was projecting into his mind. He gripped onto the presence. The only tangible thing in the dark, and projected back to the guide.
{"Will we speak again?"} He asked, trying to latch onto some sensation, any sensation. Even if it were just another voice in his mind. He really didn’t expect a response.
"I will be with you on your journey, though diminished," Guide answered. "Simply call upon me like you would your stat sheet. I can perform small tasks, but cannot have conversations, or provide opinions or advice.”
It was more than Joe had expected, though less than he’d hoped for.
“Should your find your way back to your Guide’s Domain*, we may meet again in a less restricted capacity."
Gradually something began to change. Not a thought, or a word. Not really language in the way Joe was used to speaking it. Whatever was happening was diminishing his connection to the guide. Instead of words, Joe began picking up sentiments, feelings, and vague impressions. Joe hadn’t known Guide for long. Considering they weren’t actually even ‘friends’ Joe really shouldn’t have been feeling loss. Yet as the infinite darkness began to brighten and his connection to the entity continued to weaken, Joe felt sad.
Joe tried to hold on, to shove his own feelings down the faint connection. Guide seemed to understand, sending a pulse of warmth before the connection was released.
What was left behind was a mere echo of what Joe now understood to have been a robust sympathetic bond. Joe probed the faint link, amazed by the experience, and his new companion, a blinking notification in his HUD informing him that guide had integrated into his vAIA.
Then, he was swept away by the game world.
"Welcome to Beyond the Veil, New Horizons most ambitious game yet.”
Sound – true, aural sound – echoed throughout the nothing space Joe had been transported into. Then, like the words were a catalyst, all feeling returned.
Joe found himself in a child’s body, in an ornate room, feeling quite small and fragile. Joe wasn’t tall, but he’d never been small for his age. The feeling of sudden vulnerability was unnerving, more so than even the feeling of wrongness he got after being shoved into a body not his own to play ride-along in what he expected was the game’s prologue.
He knew he was crawling around a crib, or at least the body was. Looking up, Joe saw what appeared to be a priest with gold eyes wearing a glowing golden robe with an interesting symbol embroidered on the front left, over the priest’s heart. The symbol was a horizontal line with three equidistant vertical and diagonal lines of equal length coming from the center point, making it appear like five lines that formed what could be construed as a crude sunrise made up of five rays.
The child was apprehensive, Joe could literally feel the baby’s emotions as he glanced away from the priest who was talking to… someone.
The world blurred.
They were in the same room. Joe and the person whose body he shared. They were bigger now. The crib had been replaced by a bed that the small boy, now no more than maybe two or three years old was sitting upon. He was concentrating hard. Joe felt a familiar tingling warmth, except instead of faint flashes, and brief sensations, Joe felt raw power flowing down the boy’s arm.
It was jarring. The feeling Joe could most relate it to would’ve been the one time he’d had a saline drip when he’d gotten his first subdermal. They’d hooked him up to an IV for the procedure. This rush, this power, felt like having the cold fluid pumped through his veins, except instead of being cold, the power was warm and soft. Like gentle, morning sunshine flowing through his arms.
A glowing light shimmered out of the boy's tiny hands. He giggled, looked up, and acute horror flooded through the child, punching Joe in the gut as he noticed the door opened an inch, a golden eye peeking inside.
Terrified sweat prickled on his skin as the priest discarded all pretenses and raised his hand.
Joe felt a flare of hope spark within the boy, and die abruptly as he glanced to the previously unnoticed person who entered the room behind the priest.
She was a woman with remarkably vulpine features, and dark brown skin reminiscent of a South Asian person from Earth. On her hip was a small child. A little girl no older than the body of the boy Joe occupied. Both of them had vacant gazes, their eyes forward but unseeing.
When the boy turned back to face the priest, there was a feeling of immense rage, and despair, but also confusion. Alien feelings passed through the child and slammed directly into Joe. If he could’ve gasped, he would’ve.
Instead, all the foreign feelings compounded into a perplexing mass in Joe’s chest, and he didn’t like it at all.
Joe’s attention was snapped back to the present when a sharp pain struck him right in his center. It was the same place where that wonderful warmth had come from.
The boy looked down. All that glittering light, all that power was now being sucked out of the boy's veins from the centre of his being. There the priest stood, his hand around a strange glowing dagger covered in mesmerising patterns. A dagger that was buried all the way through the tiny body of the boy.
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Blood and power. It flooded from the wound and into the priest. Magic slipped away from Joe just as inexorably as the sun set. Glowing golden eyes tinged at the edges with red. All that gentle heat disappeared leaving warm blood pumping through a cold, cold body. It was the last thing Joe felt before-
The world blurred.
The child was older now. Perhaps 11 or 12. He was running, holding what could only be considered a bō staff as he raced through dense green foliage. Callused feet protected him from many rocks and twigs, as his bare feet sprinted over the loamy earth. Joe thought this must have been what flying was like.
Joe knew, instinctually, that this was the same boy from before… But how could that be? The energy, that ephemeral something that had been stripped so mercilessly was back. Joe wanted to reach down and feel that place where the knife had plunged. But he was not in control of the body, he was simply along for the ride.
So instead, he explored the feeling. That bubbling, roiling warmth that flowed through him like blood through the veins, pumping not from the heart, but the solar plexus. It had changed. Before it was light and rich, like morning sunlight or powdered gold. Now, alongside the light was the feeling of song and sound and cool darkness. There was also earth. A feeling of growth, and life. Underneath it all was the cool sensation of shadows in the background. A peaceful undertone to an incredible medley of power.
The boy ran for a while before he was joined by a girl who appeared to be his age. She looked vaguely familiar to Joe, who tried to match her face to a memory, but the boy looked away too quickly for Joe to get a proper read. Mysteries always poked at Joe like a rock in his shoe. If he didn’t address them, his thoughts would drift and he’d be distracted. He had his vAIA make a mental note to go over the image and match it to other faces using recognition software. Joe felt better knowing his curiosity would be assuaged in time.
A feeling of hyperawareness gave Joe pause until he realized the feelings were not his own, but an echo of the boy’s. Remarkable, Joe thought as he focused on separating his own feelings from the boy’s. It was difficult, but not impossible.
Through his eyes, Joe saw… something. It was nothing Joe could put a name to. It appeared to be some sort of animal. It was obviously a predator, with dagger-sharp teeth and protracted claws. The creature was an awful mix of a baboon and a wolf. With opposable thumbs on grotesque lupine paws.
Joe would have been worried about the approach of the charging beast had the boy been worried, but contrary to what conventional logic would dictate, the boy was almost bored, just the slightest hint of anticipation leaked through. Joe could see how the boy was so confident when with a single whip of his staff an incredibly precise blade of compressed earth rose from the forest floor, neatly sliced the beast in half, and returned to the ground from where it came.
The beast, once a terrifying monster charging forward on a path to destruction, was now nothing more than a bisected corpse. With a single swing of the boy's weapon, a subtle flex of power, the world followed the boy’s silent command.
Before Joe had a chance to completely catalogue the feelings, to truly comprehend what had happened-
The world blurred.
The boy was now a young man of perhaps 16 or 17. Still obviously in his growing years though the strength and power in his limbs belied his youth. He was standing in a field Joe was sure it had once been a verdant green. Rife with crops and plants, and abundant growing things. Joe looked through the young man’s eyes at the incredible crop fields turned battleground. Blood had soaked so thoroughly into the earth, that the ground had become almost muddy. Slick with blood and viscera and bodies. So many bodies. Joe understood in that moment what it meant to ‘reap’ lives. Kilometers of carnage denoted a brutal battle. One of knife and knuckle, and of sword and sorcery. Up to this point, power had felt either abstract, or wonderous. Something that burbled under the skin like a playful brook, or that was used to strike down terrifying monsters of myth and fantasy.
Here, on this killing field, magic was devastating.
A cold sun shone down on the field, and Joe could feel the shadows underneath the boy like they were charged. They seemed to hum with the promise of power. It was so different from the soothing coolness he’d felt in the previous Vision? Episode? Joe also had to assume that his senses had been dampened, because surely, he’d feel the charnel battlefield under the young man’s boots. Surely, he’d smell the blood, the bile. The death. But he didn’t. Joe wondered idly if there was some sort of sensation limiter on the prologue, or if it’s the body he’s sharing that was actively suppressing the feelings. This adolescent that was entirely untouched in the battle.
Around him, in an imperfect circle there were no signs of fighting apart from trampled grass in eight directions. Side to side, back and fourth, diagonally forwards, and diagonally backwards. It was clinical, precise, and oddly unnerving considering the density of carnage around him.
The emotions Joe could feel from the body weren't the feelings of somebody making their first kill. Nor were they the feelings of a warrior standing victorious or defeated on the battlefield. They were the feelings Joe imagined Jayda must have felt when she claimed she was going to die. A sense of inevitability, and resignation, and bone deep weariness that felt too raw for what was meant to be a game world.
The immense power Joe could feel floating through the young man’s limbs had gone from a once gentle spark of light to a force of nature. An indomitable, nigh unstoppable power. Vines had grown from the ground, beams of scorched earth still smouldered, and bizarre rippling depressions in the landscape made joe think of the shape of crashing waves, except instead of water, it was soil and rock. The obvious evidence of magic on the field reminded Jo of a natural disaster. An act of God.
The world blurred.
The boy was now a man. He was perhaps in his late 20s or early 30s. It was hard for Joe to tell. He was sitting, elbows on his knees, his body pressed into a rigid chair. The room around them was the same ‘not-white’ - of the Guide Space starting room, and it was outfitted like a courtroom. The man stared blankly at what appeared to be a council (perhaps of judges) in an ornate chamber. Joe couldn’t quite make out their features, though he could sense an almost palpable power radiating off of them.
Even though the man was in the ‘defendant’s’ chair in what appeared to be a trial. Even though he was the one most obviously in the position of least station – sitting as he was literally below the beings arranged in front of him. It was obvious who was truly in control here, and it wasn’t the ‘judges’. In stark contrast to the tense agitation, and restrained anger of the people, the young man sat unperturbed, relaxed, almost amused by the situation.
"I will not.”
Those three words, spoken by the man, echoed through the room with the same effect as a thunderclap. Energy visibly pulsed from the obscured presences on the raised platform. It was wild and barely controlled as it lashed out in strong enough currents to be visible to even Joe’s untrained senses. Yet, nothing touched the young man. Instead, he rose and made to exit the room, turning his back on the seven seated powers. Just before they left his sight, the veil of obscurity lifted for but a moment, and Joe saw the looks on their faces. They were hard looks, unyielding looks. Looks of rage and outrage, and one of overwhelming concentration.
Then the visions ended, and Joe found himself landing softly on his booted feet in what appeared to be the foyer of a large house.
Other booted feet, sneakers, slippers, and in one case, stiletto-heeled shoes thumped, clacked, or settled down around him. Joe looked up, and the first thing he saw was a fox, man. Then 6 words flashed in front of him, just like they would have on his heads-up display, except this looked like the words were just floating in front of his vision.
"Welcome visitor to Beyond the Veil."