I was in a featureless, white room.
A blurry figure walked toward me. His form came into focus with each step as if his body was pulling itself together from nothing, taking shape before my eyes.
In moments, he appeared very much real.
The man wore a black robe with silver inscriptions that almost looked like mathematical formulas. His face was a warped tangle of flesh as if he had survived catastrophic burns. There was no hair on his head, and his nose seemed to have melted away, leaving only two vertical slits.
As he came closer, the room filled with the scent of burnt hair and sulfur.
His bare feet were completely coated in a wet, ink-like substance. His steps left steaming footprints on the white floor shaped like… hooves?
I stared in confusion because his feet were very much human, five toes and all.
His posture and expression showed no pain or care for his horrific appearance. He strode toward me, hands clasped behind his back.
My ears were ringing, but the sound suddenly snapped off when he stopped a few feet in front of me, scarred hand extended. His stench was overpowering now.
“Seraphel,” he said, voice deep and calming. “It has been far too long, friend.”
I looked at his hand, ignoring it. “Who are you?”
It seemed like the most relevant question, though, “where the hell am I?” was a close runner-up.
The burned man lowered his hand and tucked it behind his back again, apparently unbothered.
“Ah, yes,” he said. His lips were gone, forcing his face into a permanent kind of almost smile that was unnerving. “I suppose you wouldn’t recognize me, even if you had your memories. Alas, the dangers of toying with powers beyond our understanding, hm?” He spread his arms. “We’ve all paid a price.”
Did he mean his appearance was the price he paid, this place we were in, or… something else? And paid a price for what? If he knew I was Seraphel, did that make him one of The Nine?
“How would you know anything about me?” I asked.
The change in his expression was small—just a slight tightening around the eyes. “Where do you think we are, exactly?” He spread his palms, turning and facing either side of the vast expanse as if he were a teacher waiting for his student to make a guess.
I didn’t humor him, so he chuckled, sliding his hands behind his back again.
“We are in your head, Seraphel. You invited me right in. There’s nothing about you I don’t know, except, of course, the thousands of years worth of memories and information you had wiped away to activate your prestige path. Two corestones, hm? That was the real prize, wasn’t it? I must say I’m jealous. The possibilities there are quite intriguing. The other benefits are quite advantageous as well. I haven’t seen what all the others ended up with, but I have glimpsed a few already. Poor Elyon… I wonder if he even suspected what would become of him. I suppose not. The description was rather vague.”
Invited him in? Was the burned man the presence I had sensed within the dark mana? It made the most sense. I had felt a spike of dark mana punch into my brain just before entering whatever this was.
Can you hear my thoughts right now?
I tried to word the thought as clearly as possible, waiting to see if he responded, but the burned man only watched me.
Either he couldn’t read my thoughts, or he was pretending he couldn’t.
I swallowed, trying not to show my unease. And what had happened to Elyon? With this man's horrific and sinister appearance and his hints about the others, I suddenly wasn’t so sure my prestige path was the most punishing, after all. What the hell had we all gotten ourselves into?
“How do I know you’re not just a trick of the dungeon?” I asked. “Something to confuse me and manipulate me?”
“That’s the beautiful part. You don’t. Though, I suppose if I thought it would be more fun to make you certain, I could do this—”
His hand extended toward me. I tried to flinch away, but his fingers grew longer, shooting forward until they punched through my forehead with small, painless pops.
Visions flooded my mind.
I saw the world as if I was in somebody else’s body. The scenes came as snapshots that flashed across my eyes faster than I could process. I saw people and places I didn’t recognize. Great cities, terrible dungeons, towering creatures, piles of twisted corpses, a black temple in the middle of an endless expanse of sand, and I saw a wide yellow eye. The eye kept flashing between the images, returning again and again, filling me with stomach-clenching dread each time. But I also saw… me. I saw myself from somebody else’s perspective. I saw myself as I am now, and I saw the gradual change of years and power coming over me.
And then it abruptly stopped. None of it had lasted long enough for me to get more than a vague impression of an impossible amount of time and experience and the certainty that whoever shared the visions was absolutely one of The Nine.
I nearly fell back, blinking hard. “What… what the fuck was that?”
“Proof,” the burned man said. “Now you know I am who I say I am, unless you believe your puny mind could create that on its own. But you felt the truth of it. There’s no use pretending you didn’t.”
He was right, of course. There was a feeling with the visions of reality that I couldn’t shake. I believed the visions were real, and I believed he was one of The Nine, like he claimed.
“What do you want?”
“Right now? I was hoping for amusement. If you think I’m just the dungeon fucking with you, then what would the point of speaking with you be? But if you know I’m a fellow god, well, then things get more interesting, don’t they?”
“What happened to you?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I trusted him to tell me the truth, but the question itched at me.
His eyes flicked up. They were pools of black without a hint of color. He raised a long finger, wagging it between us as he clicked his tongue. “No, no, no, Seraphel. You don’t get to know everything. Not this time. This time, I’m the one in control.” He laughed softly to himself. “I wish you could imagine how the old you would be infuriated by that, but I suppose even this version of you doesn’t like it. Do you?”
As much as I wanted to ask questions, I was beginning to understand this man couldn’t be trusted. The only thing I could trust him to do was try to manipulate me. Answers he gave would be as good as poison—bits of information designed to sit inside me and eventually lead me straight toward his goals. But I had seen hints of human emotion from him. Jealousy. Rage. A temptation for amusement. Maybe I could turn the tables slightly and earn myself a few scraps of information if I played my cards right.
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“I can’t say it bothers me much,” I said, trying to sound calm.
He sneered. “No? Then you’re a fool who doesn’t understand his situation.”
“I think I understand more than you realize. The dark mana is how you plan to influence me, right?” I asked. “You’re within it, somehow?”
The burned man gave no response as he continued to pace slowly from side to side, inky black eyes never leaving mine.
“When you poked around in my head, did you happen to ask yourself how the cursed bedroll was going to screw up your plans?”
“That thing doesn’t matter to me. The dark mana has already infected your corestones. You can cleanse the dark mana from your body and your channels, but your corestones have been touched by it. They were houses built of wood, and I have reshaped them with brick. The only way you could remove me now would be to tear them down completely. To destroy them.”
I smiled. Honestly, his stench and presence still unsettled me. But I clung to false confidence like a shield. I could feel him already playing into my hand, if only slightly. The bedroll could cleanse the dark mana, but not the corestones? That was valuable information.
“Have you considered that I wanted this?” I asked. “You’ve helped me. I needed a way to keep my bedroll fed when I wasn’t in a dungeon, and you’ve just handed it to me.”
“If you think you’ll wield me like a tool, you truly are delusional. You know nothing, Seraphel. You’ve seen to that yourself. I may be—” he paused, eyes narrowing.
Damn it. Had he been about to reveal something else?
“Hah!” he said, tilting his head as he began slowly pacing around me. “Even without your memories of everything we went through here, I can still see the same old Seraphel in those eyes. You were always calculating and scheming. Always thinking! I can tell you’re doing it right now, aren’t you? You’re up to something…”
I jerked back when he tapped my temple with a fingertip.
The burned man let out a sudden, cackling laugh, and then the smooth, rippled skin of his brows drew together. “Tell me something. Does the name Matthew Walsh ring a bell?”
Matthew Walsh? The name gave me a sudden jolt of oddness. It reminded me of a co-worker. We had plans to meet on the last day I remembered before… No. Hadn’t I remembered waking up in my bed when I arrived on Eros? I thought I had gone to sleep and woken up here.
But that was wrong, wasn’t it? I missed work that day. I met with my sister, a few of her friends, and some of mine from work. And then…
The burned man was simply watching me, head tilted. “Ring any bells, ‘Brynn’?”
I stared at him. “Matthew Walsh is a common enough name. And you were in my head. You could’ve just pulled it from my mind.”
“Not a common name here,” he said. The corner of his twisted mouth pulled up in amusement. “And certainly, I could have pulled it from your mind. Yes. That’s very true. You’ll just have to wonder if I only mentioned it to toy with you, or because it means something. Tell me,” he said, suddenly leaning closer. “Why do you think you chose the Path of the Fertile Seed?”
Did he know? Or was he trying to dig for clues from me?
I chose not to answer, simply waiting for him to offer up more information, tainted as it might be.
The burned man eventually shrugged. as if he hadn’t expected an answer. “Each path could only be picked once. And if you ask me, I think you may have snagged up the best one before the rest of us got our pick. A clean slate.” The burned man threaded his hands behind his hairless head, walking in a circle as if he was entertaining the idea. “Keeping your sanity after so many years… that, my friend. That is the real challenge, isn’t it? Some of us managed to a degree, certainly. But we’re all a little wrong in the head by now, aren’t we? But you were maybe the most sane of all. You and Ithariel, perhaps. So why did you do it? Did you think you could use it to forget what happened with her?”
All I could do was watch and wonder if any of this was true. But what purpose would making it all up serve? It really did feel like he was enjoying this. Maybe we had been rivals before the prestige, and this was a sort of victory lap for him? Was it just a chance to gloat in front of a formerly powerful rival who he now saw as weak?
The burned man chuckled as he continued to pace. “Interesting. Not even going to ask who “she” was? It’s all the same, I suppose. But that’s the point of wiping your memories, isn’t it? You wouldn’t remember if I told you.”
“What do you want?” I asked. I was growing tired of this and was increasingly sure I wouldn’t get any valuable information from the man. “Where are my friends? Are they okay?”
“They are crowded around your unconscious body as we speak, worrying about you. People always gravitate toward you, don’t they? Even without your power, you suck them in, draw them into your endless plans. Before Eros, it was the same. You know, I looked up to you back then.”
He resumed his slow, circling path, hands clasped behind his back.
“You know,” he said. “I quite enjoy seeing you so powerless. So curious. I imagine it would have driven you mad to know you would be the one among us with the least information. Hah! How the tables have turned, my old friend.”
“You’ve had your chance to ramble,” I said, finally letting my irritation show. “I don’t have time for this bullshit. I want out of this place. Send me back.”
“Tisk tisk, Seraphel. Look at you with all the power of an insect and still barking commands as if you expect me to obey? Lucky for you, we are outside time. Your friend, Lyria, already put you on that nasty little bedroll you were hiding. I realized what it was doing and brought you here.”
I waited. That was some information to stash away, at least. Why would he need to bring me here once he realized what the bedroll was doing? It likely meant the bedroll cleansing my body of dark mana would remove his ability to exert this kind of influence on me. If so, then my bedroll could help me keep him from influencing me, even if my corestones themselves had been reshaped with dark mana.
“It’s really no matter,” he sighed. “I didn’t bring you here to ask for your compliance or beg you to work with me. No. I suspect you’re already dreaming of a plan to control me and the power I’ve granted you.”
“You’re the dark mana?” I asked plainly. I was fairly certain by now, but I might as well see if he wanted to offer up an explanation.
“No,” he said. “No,” he added again, as if the explanation was partially correct. “This is all you need to know… Our goals are not so different. I’m sure you have no fucking clue what your goal is at this point, but you’re Brynn Stygos, aren’t you? You are putting together the puzzle with the pieces you have. Why else would you send yourself back to get more power, after all? Memories or not, you’ve doubtless figured out you need to advance and grow. You’ve assumed there’s a threat that needs stopping. And you’re correct.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “This is where you’re going to give me some evil villain speech about how the threat is actually in our best interest, and you’re planning to help it?”
The burned man laughed. “No, no, no. You and I want the same thing, Brynn. I want to put a stop to it as well. And thus, I have granted you my power. It is simplicity itself. There may be some other small details to work out in the future, but for now, that is true enough.”
I waited.
He raised both palms, lipless mouth curved in a smile. “What? Don’t believe me?”
“Of course I don’t.”
He laughed, throwing his head back. “No. Of course, you don’t.”
“What is the threat?” I asked carefully. I expected nothing, but the burned man almost seemed to shrink.
His eyes shifted downward, then back up to mine. He was wearing his confidence again, but I hadn’t missed the momentary glimpse of weakness. Of fear?
The sight of it made me cold all over. What the hell had scared us so badly? What had pushed us to inflict this insanity on ourselves?
“What is it?” I asked again.
“You’ll find out,” he said. “Even I won’t inflict that knowledge on you. Enjoy your brief ignorance. Consider it one last gift for old time’s sake. For now, feel free to use my power. Learn to wield it. It’s really no skin off my back. And when you tire of fighting against my influence, remember how we fought when you let me have control. That was only a glimpse of what we could do together. In your desperate moments, remember that my assistance is waiting. All you need to do is reach out and grab it. Together, we could do great things. Together, we will do great things. I’m certain of it.” He clapped me on the back, flashing a dark smile.
I felt myself yanked backward and experienced an explosion of vertigo. I was falling, and then I was motionless, my head still swimming.