He woke up that morning like he woke up the morning before that and the morning before that: in constant, wide-eyed pain. Bile rose in his throat; he turned and threw up on the floor. The vomit was the same pale greenish-yellow as the day before. Only now there was a drop of swirling black in it. He stared at it blankly before he noticed approaching stomping.

He raised his head and saw Cade, walking towards him, exceptionally angry. He shrank back, trying to explain, but no sound came out.

She was yelling, but Aurelius had a hard time hearing. He moved his jaw, and his ears popped. Cade's voice came right after. "Do you?!" She shook him by the shoulders, shouting in his face. "Five days, Aurelius! You were spasming. I thought you were really going to die, you understand?" Aurelius just made some idiotic noise. Cade pushed him before turning away and cursing.

The memories flashed in Aurelius' mind. The images of essence, the spasming, the agony. He gasped.

Cade turned, her face twisted. "You promised me you'd stay away from enhancers. You promised yourself!" She came close, grasping him by the neck. A blade materialized in her hand, and she pressed it to his throat. "Do you want to die? Is that it? Is it?!"

Aurelius looked away. He felt a slight sting. A cold sensation. A drop of blood went down his neck, staining his bandages.

"If you do, then why don't you fucking say so?! Because I'll do it. I'll slit your throat right now. Because you cannot live like this!"

Aurelius looked back down, his one dull blue eye meeting Cade's dark gaze. She was on him, close to him. He told the truth, his voice deep, rough, and monotone. "I don't know. I'm just a mess." He blinked, raising a hand to touch Cade's. "I'm sorry. I just am."

Cade's lips quivered. She backed away and covered her face. Her shoulder shook. Then she wiped her eyes, stoic again, and left without another word.

Aurelius let his body relax and wallowed in his countless wounds. Despite everything, he felt a little better just admitting that he didn't know. He was lost. But even then, that image of the paths of essence didn't leave him. It was an abstraction, but the hope it gave was real. For the first time in what seemed like forever, Aurelius felt a bit of hope.

***

Weeks passed. Aurelius was getting better. His body at least. While he was mentally absent, he had gotten rid of half his bandages. That still left a sizable portion of his body covered in them, but it was progress.

He and Cade didn't talk much. It was pretty awkward, but it wasn't like they hated each other. Aurelius could never get a word out, so he would just lay there, staring ahead.

Cade washed him sometimes, going over his body with a sponge. It was humiliating, but when Aurelius glanced at her while she was doing it, he felt a little happy. She looked so caring that Aurelius felt younger.

He revisited his childhood home a lot in his daydreams. Imagining himself walking through the vast forest in which he'd learned how to use essence, he was able to leave everything else behind. He was free. Once again, he was able to talk with the birds and hedgehogs. Butterflies landed on his shoulders, and ladybugs sat on his fingers. He was smiling again until reality crashed down.

One day, he managed to ask Cade to carry him outside onto the terrace. They passed Aleyah on the way. She and Aurelius hadn't spoken.

When he finally got to sit down outside on the terrace, he noticed how hot it was. The sun burned up above. Once upon a time, Aurelius could've enhanced himself to regulate his body temperature, but now he was at nature's mercy.

Cade made herself a chair out of essence and sat behind him, out of his sight. They were there for a while. Aurelius thought about that time almost exactly two years ago when they'd been on the same terrace.

He'd been training when Cade came and told him something that hadn't quite registered back then. She'd warned him about killing. About how easy it got. Killing as something like an addiction had been incomprehensible to Aurelius back then. Looking back on the past year, he had no idea how far his trail of bodies stretched. There had to be thousands. If put in a line, they'd gone further than the eye could see. He had slashed man after man, all the way to Gadreel. There it ended.

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It was a foreign feeling. He didn't know how to feel about it. The idea that he was never going to kill anyone ever again.

Right as he arrived at that thought, a butterfly with orange and black wings landed on his hand. He stayed deathly still, but the butterfly quickly flapped its wings to leave as fast as it came. Even then, Aurelius felt a little better as he watched it fly away.

***

Aurelius spent a lot of time staring at reflective surfaces. Four was the number of wounds that lined his face, all sown neatly shut. It was Aleyah's work. Once they healed, he'd have deep scars for the rest of his life. One over his left cheek, one on his nose bridge and right cheek, one diagonally over his right eye, and the last diagonally from his forehead to almost the corner of his mouth.

Once upon a time, he'd felt his face to be alien from the rest of his body. Now it fit in well with the rest of the scarred mess. He'd even gotten the first scar on his neck. It was on the left side, courtesy of the lady in red whose spear had almost killed him.

He wondered what all those scars meant. How did others see them? How did he himself see them?

He looked at his reflection on his glass of water. He took it into his hand. He looked at himself closely and touched the scar that ran through the middle of his face. He made just the slightest contact, and electric pain shot down his spine. He decided to leave the wound alone and went to lower the glass.

Suddenly his heart burst into intense pain. The glass fell from his grasp and shattered. Aurelius didn't spare the water and shards of glass any thought. The stinging in his heart suffocated him. He gasped and clawed at his chest.

'W—what's happening? What is this?' Aurelius thought, groaning as he tried to find a position that would alleviate the pain. He couldn't. The stinging only increased, and he started to feel cold with sweat. He gulped as a single panic-inducing thought filled his mind. 'Am I… having a heart attack?'

Then he felt a whisper in his ear. It was a seductive and sadistic voice. "Is life treating you well, my dear soulmate?"

Aurelius's entire body jerked. He fell out of the bed onto the shards of glass on the floor. He didn't feel anything. He looked around frantically, his lone eye wide and his breathing hurried and irregular.

'I knew it. He's alive.' Aurelius pushed his back up against the wall and looked for Gadreel. 'Where is he? Where is he?!'

The room was empty. Aurelius blinked and gulped.

'But I heard him.' He thought, knitting his brows. 'I heard him.' His wild heartbeat was starting to calm.

He looked down and noticed red mixed in with the water. There were a couple shards of glass in his thigh. He frowned, as he couldn't feel a single thing.

His gaze then wandered to a shard of glass. He jolted again at the sight, and his heart again threatened to explode against his ribs. Quickly he turned his head. There was nothing there. He looked back to the glass. On it was a reverberating abstract reflection. It was of an angelic beauty in the form of a young man with attractive, auburn hair and vast, demonic eyes.

"Hello, Aurelius," the ghost said with attachment so genuine it was sickening. "Oh, how I've missed you."

Aurelius noticed his jaw shaking and tried to stop but couldn't. A fear filled him. The very same he'd felt as he went into his seizure in the unspeakable castle hall. He would've curled up into a ball if he'd been able to, but as he couldn't, he resorted to pushing himself away from that sight.

He didn't know if it was all in his mind or if it was actually happening. He pressed his hands against his temples. He shut his eye. He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know. The voice kept talking. He pressed his hands to his ears. The voice persisted, no quieter.

"Shut up. Shut up. Shut up! Shut up!!!" Aurelius shouted, but he still heard it. He didn't want to make sense of it. He was afraid of those words.

He felt a hand land on his shoulder. His eye shot open, and he recoiled from the contact. He tried to get away, repeating those same two words. It kept talking. His expression twisted as he realized there was nowhere for him to escape to.

"Calm down," Cade said as she approached him slowly. "Just breathe." She tried to soothe him, but he barely heard her over the ghost. It whispered inside his ear. It was behind his eyes.

"I don't—I can't stop it. I can't..." Aurelius tried to explain, but of course she couldn't understand.

She came closer without saying anything. Aurelius tried to say something. She shushed him calmly before hugging him as he sat there. Somehow, it made Aurelius' heart calm, and he accepted the embrace, breathing deep.

***

The next day, Aurelius couldn't eat. Cade seemed to understand and gave him space. It took him a while to recover from the initial shock and longer to realize that he must've looked like a madman.

After that, however, he finally found himself considering more deeply Gadreel's ability to manipulate Aurelius' essence. The way he did it through skin-on-skin contact and concentration was like a primitive version of controlling one's own essence but in another's body.

That night something that had been brewing in Aurelius' mind clicked. Those images he'd seen through the drop of enhancer—like lightning striking and ricocheting through a person's body—he realized that was what Gadreel must've known. It must've been part of his fundamental understanding.

He remembered Gadreel's intense yell, 'Can you grasp it?!' And he remembered faintly the feeling of the world of pure essence vibrating around him, coming alive almost consciously.

'That's the key,' Aurelius thought. That understanding was the way to reinforce his severed essence pathways. It was the only way. Aurelius thought about his life and everything he'd lost. And in the darkness of his room of recovery, he made the decision to persist no matter what.

He squeezed his fist with the last of his power. 'I have to get it back!'