The return trip took the same three days as the previous two times Adam had travelled the route. During that time it became obvious that a great many changes had come to the small group. Instead of hiding from Jay at the front of the group where he couldn’t see the boy to avoid triggering System Assistance’s unique blend of conversational ineptness, Adam spent time attempting to help them both grow more comfortable in each other’s presence at the urging of Martin. In spite of his earlier fears, the closer contact and constant conversation seemed to be putting the boy more at ease than his original standoffish attitude.

This was reflected in the avatar of Jay within the bear’s cave. The boy’s partially translucent figure spent less time huddling in on itself, and more warming himself by the fire that represented Mother’s Love. Adam half expected to see the boy’s figure curled up with the bear at night for a warm place to sleep. More important than the physical changes with the avatar’s behavior were the emotional ones.

Originally all the boy had done was weep. Well, there was also the screaming during the bear incident, but it was better not to revisit that. Those emotions, sadness, fear, et cetera, had all been broadcast out from the boy’s avatar. They made the bear’s sleep uneasy, and also unsettled the rest of his skills that dealt with children in any form. Now though, Mama Bear was nearly purring in her rest, and even the old crone was puttering around with a smile on her face. The avatar was no longer surrounded by an aura of darkness, but one of light. Contentment, trust, loyalty, respect, even a small piece of love were all spreading through his mind originating from the boy in the cave.

Adam went to sleep each night suffused with warm feelings, leaving him resonating more and more with Mama Bear as their existences seem to be so in tune. That only lasted until the second night.

That’s when the hell gates to Jay’s previous existence truly opened.

It didn’t start off bad, but nightmares rarely do.

In a field of golden warmth a small boy spent time playing with a man and woman. From the way they lavished attention on the boy, and the wide, happy smiles on their faces, it was obvious that they loved him. There were many hugs, games, and time spent snuggling. It was the perfect dream of childhood that all children wish for.

And then the shadow came.

As first it was just out of sight. Hidden, but felt at times. A cold breeze on the back of the neck, a darkness under a bush. Then it grew. No more trips to the forest, it was no longer safe under the trees. The games were less fun when they had to constantly look over their shoulders. Snuggling for love became huddling together for warmth, safety. A circle encroached upon the fields, swallowing the edges, hemming them in. There was nowhere to go, no escape from the darkness that was hunting the family. Hunting and consuming.

First it was the father. Tendrils of the darkness clung to his limbs, slowing, then stopping the hugs. They would drag him away, keeping him from the games that were increasingly fraught with a sense of danger. Hugs, cuddling, any time together with the man and boy was stolen by the darkness. The man was constantly at the edges, seen at times, but mostly missed. After a long stretch where the man could not be found no matter how the boy and woman searched, the darkness showed them what it had been doing.

The man stood high above them, surrounded by the once golden walls of the Church of the Sun King. Sunbursts adorned nearly every inch of the structure, and yet they no longer reflected the light of the sun. The darkness had infested the entire structure, consuming the light and joy that the edifice to glory had once held. It was a mockery of what it had been, but even that veneer barely attempted to hide the seething mass of vileness that it had become. While he was distracted by the sight of the man, the boy was grasped by tendrils of darkness that rose up out of the ground. They held him fast, forcing him to watch what was to come.

Adam knew what was coming, and yet, like the boy he knew to be Jay, he couldn’t look away.

The man high above them had once been a source of light. He was smiles and laughter and love, but he had been consumed and corrupted. The darkness was blatantly visible behind the man’s eyes. It had won, but it wasn’t content to win the man, it wanted more. It wanted everything. It cast the man out as an example, of its disdain, of its measure of the man’s worth. Jay watched as the man that raised him with care and love was cast down to shatter upon the once golden cobbles at his feet.

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The blood that spilled from the body was tinged with black, and that black consumed even faster than the red blood spread. Soon the world was only two shades, the black of the darkness as it tore aside the false world that had once hidden it away, and the red that signified the man that had turned away from him to bring the darkness forth.

Adam knew it wasn’t real, but it was real to Jay, and that was what was important.

Because then it got worse.

It was obvious that the boy had loved his father, he emulated him in all the many ways that a son would do with a father. Perhaps the most important copied behavior was the same the world over. A young boy loved his mother.

Even when that mother was consumed by the darkness. Even when that darkness turned the mother into a shell that it wore to present to the world. Even when the darkness used the mother to create more darkness to spread out into the world. And even when that shell was swept away to be nothing but the darkness that was looking to consume the boy as well.

Adam had been told the story, but it was different, much, much different, to experience it through Jay’s eyes.

He was forced to watch as the mother became darkness itself, but no longer a nebulous thing that lurked at the edges of the world. No, the darkness took the shape of his mother. Stripped it naked and cavorted with shadows. He watched the boy’s mother encourage those shadows to beat and abuse the boy, or help in the attempts to entice him to let the darkness inside of him as well through pills and liquids suffused with its essence. At times the shadows would were distorted masks of his nearly forgotten father in an attempt to grow closer to the mother, before they showed they too were made of the darkness. Other times his mother and the shadows would beat and whip him, drive him out into the land of shadows where he was hunted by yet more of the creatures he could not understand, caricatures of people. There was no rest, no shelter, and no sustenance. Nothing but shadows, darkness, and the thing that wore his mother’s face. The thing he could not stop loving.

Slowly, over the seemingly never ending nightmare, a poison seeped into the boy. As he grew, his body needed materials to grow from and all that was available was what surrounded him. In time the light that was once all he was made of was subsumed, buried beneath the filth, the shadows, and the darkness. When nearly all of what once made up the boy was gone, the gold faded and tarnished, the light faded to nearly nothing, the thing in the mother costume threw him away again, this time into the arms of another creature. All of the good that was once in the boy despaired, believing that the final moment was upon it. There was barely anything left to fight back with, low energy, even lower interest. The boy had become a creature of instinct, and that instinct was fear.

But the end didn’t come. There were moments where it seemed inevitable, where surely the final blow was coming for him. At first he thought the blow was held back to extend his fear, his terror. To revel in the suffering it caused. However that wasn’t the case. He saw instead another boy and a man standing between him and that final blow. Time after time they stood in the way, fighting back against the darkness that had nearly swallowed him whole. There were monsters and men, yet still they held. They were beaten, battered, and bruised. And still they stood between him and the darkness.

Like the man of long ago, they too had a sheen of golden warmth to them. He hadn’t seen it at first because it was something that can only be seen when it can be felt. Over time, as their warmth burned away some of the taint that had filled his character, he started to remember. And he started to hope. And, eventually, he started to love again.

Adam would have been happy if that was where it ended. A happy ending to a tale that he could feel on a visceral level. He too knew the feeling of that darkness, and had never wanted to know its touch again. His own life had had more than enough of it for any one life, but now he carried the burden of knowledge, the knowledge of how Jay had suffered beneath that taint as well. He knew he would never hesitate to help the smaller boy, and that was what scared him. Because the dream wasn’t done.

Jay, seeing that the warmth could burn away the filth, the taint, wanted to save his mother. The woman that had embraced and embodied the darkness to the point that she became the darkness. The woman he still loved, regardless of all that she had done to him. The love and hope of a child is nearly infinite. Until it’s not.

Adam wasn’t scared of the boy wanting to help his mother. He would help as best he could, even if it was just to create a safe place, a bastion of warmth from which to assault the darkness of his mother’s existence. As much as he didn’t want to, he could understand. His own experience combined with the skills he had gained since he was Gifted made it impossible not to. And those same things meant that he also understood the boy’s mother, and that was why he was scared.

Because she too was a mother. Mothers could come in any shape or form, and they weren’t all equal. Some needed support and help, but when that was taken from them they failed. Then the only person they hurt more than themselves was their children. And that was what Adam feared most.