I yawned, stretching mightily, still sprawled between the roughspun woolen sheets of my bed. The coarse fabric scratched my skin, coloring it light pink in swathes and patches.
Groaning softly, I clutched my head.
It was pounding. The pressure within my skull felt on the brink of overloading, bursting, forcing grey matter strenuously out of my ears and nose. I hadn’t slept well at all, plagued by nightmares that ensured my slumber was oft interrupted. I couldn’t remember them exactly, which was always annoying. If it were up to me, I’d have slept more, but I couldn’t keep Master waiting.
Today was exam day.
Despite my body’s ardent protest, I painfully extricated myself from the threadbare cloth that coddled me, groggily wiping the sleep from my eyes and jumping off the bed, landing on the hard cottage floor with a thump.
Huh. That was weird.
My legs seemed…small.
My vision seemed too low.My head barely made it over the bed, which itself stood not five feet off the ground. My height seemed so much lesser than it had been…yesterday?
No, wait.
It wasn’t different. Why would it be? After all, I was still a growing boy, barely ten namedays. I must have been confused. The migraine was slowly subsiding, but still it clouded my mind, making it difficult to think straight.
Shaking my head frustratedly, I shambled over to my makeshift closet. As I opened the wooden cabinet drawers, the sweet scent of cocoa greeted my nostrils. Eagerly, I slipped on a woolen tunic and breeches, and threw open the door that led from my bedroom to the rest of the house.
There, standing right beside the stove, gently stirring a pot of dark, sugary liquid, was Mom.
She looked just the same as ever, long beautiful locks of hair as white as snow falling almost to reach the small of her back, complimenting her porcelain complexion. Even undertaking such a mundane task, her posture was graceful, elegant, refined over years of brushing shoulders with high society and toughened from time spent as a mother forced to raise a child in the wilds, all on her own.
For a brief moment, my headache flared. A miniscule part of me, buried deep, deep within, felt terribly saddened by seeing her, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure why.
Shaking my head once more to clear it, I grinned broadly, skipping my way to the kitchen table as I greeted her.
“Hi Mom!”
“Well, look who’s finally awake,” she said, smiling right back at me.
Her eyes met mine, soft and clear and ever so slightly blue. They comforted me immensely, making me feel safe, and loved, and home. They elicited memories of long nights spent huddled beneath blankets, of stories shared in secret between just us two. They were just as full of light and life as ever, but circling underneath them, choking them from below, were a pair of thick, black rings.
The rings were growing.
Every passing day had seen them larger than the last. Every passing day, Mom looked more tired, haggard, and weary. She looked more gaunt, thin, and stringy. I didn’t know what was happening to her. I’d seen the same evolution take place on the faces of others in the village, every now and then, invariably ending in death.
But Mom couldn’t die. She wouldn’t.
I knew it with all the certainty in the world. Dad had already abandoned me, abandoned us. Mom would never do the same. And besides, the other villagers had been much older than her when they’d passed.
She was far too young to die.
No, there was no way. I tried not to think about it. I didn’t mention it to her, either. Mom already did so much for me. I didn’t want to be a bother.
“You excited?” She asked, still grinning at me. She wiggled her eyebrows enthusiastically. “Big day today, isn’t it?”
Then she leaned down, whispering conspiratorially.
“I’ve made a little treat for you before your test,” she confessed, placing a tray of cookies down in front of me.
They looked absolutely exquisite.
Little swordsmen with bodies made of supple, succulent gingerbread, holding broken candy canes as makeshift blades. Tiny drops of hardened honey made up their eyes and mouths, and dotted their gauntlets and vambraces. Beautiful and delectable.
My mouth watered. I eyed the confections hesitantly.
“Uhmmmmm…Master Ewan says I have to eat right or I won’t get big muscles like his,” I recited, reluctantly.
Mom tilted her head back, ivory ringlets dancing about her waist, laughing in an angelic tinkling of precious bells. The sound of her laughter made the pang of sadness deep within me swell immensely, almost overwhelming me for a moment, before retreating once more, just as inexplicably.
“Well,” she said, winking at me while she began pouring the cocoa, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
It was all the excuse I needed. I dove into the edible treasures, all soft ginger and honeyed candy that gushed as it exploded between my teeth.
“And besides,” she continued, walking over to me and placing the now-full mug of hot chocolate down next to the sweets.
She tousled my hair gently, running her slender fingers delicately through it. “You work hard enough as it is, Taivy. I can’t imagine a single meal would be capable of ruining your diet so thoroughly.”
“Master says,” I mumbled back, mouth full of cookies and chocolate, “a balanced diet is the foundation upon what–”
“Upon which,” Mom corrected, beginning to wash and clear away the dishes.
“–upon which, strength is built,” I finished, still devouring the food. “And I need to be strong, Mom.”
My words hung in the air.
Mom was quiet for a while after that, the only sounds emanating from the room being the muted tinkle of shifting kitchenware and my own chewing and slurping.
“And why is that?”
“Huh?” I replied, looking up to find Mom all of a sudden staring intently at me, cutlery forgotten.
“Why do you need to be strong?” She repeated.
“I, uh…”
I paused tilting my head. Why did I need to be strong?
The pain in my skull throbbed forth once more, making me wince. Images flashed through my mind, of a burning village, a gilded knight, a golden centipede. Of secrets and knowledge and the fate of all the WORLD–
I shook my head, grimacing, clearing the hallucinations.
“Because heroes are strong,” I replied, confidently, returning to finish what remained of my meal. “And I’m going to be a hero.”
Mom nodded, slowly.
“And is that…all it takes to be a hero?” She pressed.
Once again, I stopped eating, unsure. Once again, the migraine pulsed, but I ignored it. The truth was, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what exactly it took to be a hero. But I knew that every hero was strong.
You couldn’t become a hero without power.
“I dunno,” I replied, finally.
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“I’ll figure out the rest later, I guess,” I concluded.
Mom nodded once more, slowly. She turned around, and the clinking and clattering of dishes resurfaced. I picked up the last gingerbread swordsman, eyeing it curiously.
This one looked different from the others. Somehow, Mom had colored its hair white, just like mine. She’d given it a different sword as well–this one wasn’t a round candy cane at all. It was a proper blade, sharp and deadly-looking, bone-white with almost imperceptibly small silver runes inscribed upon it. Mom was a good cook, and an excellent baker, but this was something else. How’d she manage to draw them so precisely?
Hunching over to examine it more closely, my concentration was broken by her next words.
“You know,” she said, casually, “Your father was strong.”
I froze.
“Very strong,” she went on. “The strongest man I’d ever met, probably. Was he a hero, too?” She asked, affecting inquisitiveness.
“No.”
I replied vehemently, instantly, frowning at her.
“He was a villain,” I stated loudly, angrily.
Mom nodded for a third time, still casual.
“I see,” she said. “But, certainly, he was strong,” she considered, tapping her finger on her chin contemplatively.
“If he was strong, and heroes are strong, then what separates the two?” She asked me.
I was confused. I didn’t understand what she was saying. How could my father be a hero? The headache flared back into existence, stronger than ever before. This time, it showed no signs of dissipating. It thudded violently against my temples, pushing on the sockets of my eyes. My vision swam.
I grit my teeth, holding one hand against the side of my skull as I replied.
“He left us,” I snarled.
“A manner of strength,” she countered quickly, easily. “He didn’t need us. He didn’t need anyone. Is that not strong? The ability to survive without anyone else’s help? To be reliant on no other? Is that not heroic?”
“No,” I cried, desperately, barely able to speak as the pain blossomed brutally inside my mind.
It spread down, metastasizing from brain to heart, causing a pang of agony to grip my chest, a metallic vice that compressed my lungs, cracked my ribs, and caused my most vital organ to beat furiously.
I moaned in anguish, crouched over the table, the fresh torment causing tears to flow from my eyes and snot to clog my nose. The room grew blurry, but even through the tears, it felt like the wooden walls themselves were warping, distorting, waving like grass in the breeze.
“A real…h–hero…would…would never…abandon…his fa–his family,” I choked out, gasping for breath as my lungs filled with fluid.
“But, isn’t that what you did?”
What?
My eyes snapped up to meet Mom’s.
A strange smile had plastered itself across her face. It was a sickly, sordid thing. A rictus grin that made my skin crawl slightly. Uncanny. Evil. Alien.
It didn’t belong on her.
“You left them, didn’t you?” She spoke once more, but it wasn’t her voice.
It was a chorus of one thousand souls speaking discordantly, a hundred different tunes and tenors, highs and lows, all converging unusually into one theme. A cacophony forced to coexist. I could barely even comprehend it.
It felt like sandpaper chafing against my ears.
“What?” I croaked, coughing wetly. I could scarcely speak. There was something in me, something stuck inside my chest, blocking my breath.
I needed to get it out.
I gagged, falling to my knees, dry heaving plaintively. Dark spots were saturating the edges of my vision. I was asphyxiating. I retched again, and again, and again, until finally, joyously, I managed to violently spit out the object that had somehow lodged itself in my esophagus. It clattered to the floor.
It was an Entropy crystal, covered in dark, almost black, congealed blood.
“W–what? The fuck…” I murmured, lurching unsteadily to my feet. I gripped the table with knuckles white to keep my balance, the room still spinning nauseatingly around me.
“I think…ooouuuh,” I groaned, clutching my head, the pain in my chest relieved, but the pressure between my temples just as torturous as ever. My cheeks were still wet, very wet, too wet to just be from tears, and when I wiped my hand across them it returned absolutely drenched with blood.
“Oh, Gods, I think something’s wrong, something’s wrong with me–,” I said tremulously, voice shaking.
“You abandoned them!” My mother shouted, ignoring my distress. “Those you called your friends. Those you called your family. Half you left to bandits, to pursue your foolish dreams of Blessing, delving where you should never have been. The other half, you left to rot in the bowels of the Dungeon.”
I stared at her, eyes as wide as dinner plates.
She was yelling at me. Mom had never yelled at me, never even raised her voice at me, not once, not in her entire life.
“You’re just like your FATHER!” the creature that was not, that could not be my mother shrieked at me in the voice of a collapsing star.
The cottage surrounding us exploded.
Its crumbling timber walls and hard-baked clay foundation disintegrated, shattering into microscopic shards of matter in a noiseless detonation. It happened in slow motion, the pain finally reaching its breaking point as something far up my nose popped, and leaked down the front of my tunic, an azure stream joining the red.
The facade had vanished, revealing what had always lay hidden behind it.
An endless void.
It was the same place as my trigger vision, the exact same. A vacuum dark as pitch with countless entrancing stars dotting its surface. Except, this time, I wasn’t floating high above my fragile home planet. Instead, a vast ocean of sea-green energy spread out below me.
I was so high up, so immersed in the upper abyss, that it looked barely the size of a pea, yet I felt I could almost make out some features in the very center of the sea. An obsidian volcano raging below a crimson storm.
Turning slowly, I regarded the monstrosity I’d once thought to be my mother.
Its body had unraveled, the flesh and skin and bone of the person I’d loved most in all the world dissolving to form infinite insectoid tendrils that stretched out like tiny arms, millions of them curling around me.
Its torso was a thick, pulsating larva of red and white, blood and bone. It still wore the dermis of my mother’s face like a paper mache mask, crooked and brutalized, but now two ruby mandibles had pierced through her cheeks, further mutilating her.
Multifaceted eyes as black as the void that surrounded us peered callously down at me, a crown of gold and obsidian floated atop its head, and red lightning flickered in the space behind it.
I stared at the thing wearing my mother’s face in terror as it approached me.
“You’re just like your father,” the grotesque starspawn repeated. It wasn’t grinning at me anymore, but that might’ve just been because it lacked the muscles to do so.
“He didn’t need anyone, and neither do you,” it continued, drawing ever closer to me.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed, terrified. I didn’t know if I was young, or old, ten or nineteen, Blessed or mundane, alive or dead. I was in limbo, unable to think straight, memories appearing and disappearing and flooding my mind in a constant whirlwind. The creature’s voice forced its way viciously into my ears, violating my mind, causing me to suffer immensely each time I heard it.
It didn’t care.
“Neither, do we,” it crooned, stroking my face with innumerable inhuman antennae. My stomach churned, but I couldn’t vomit any more than I could draw away from its caress.
“Strength is everything. Kill, or be killed. Feed, or be fed upon. Since time immemorial. Since the beginning. As it was, so it shall be.”
“We’ve no need of friends,” the cosmic horror spat in fury.
“For we are not servant,” it continued, its butchered face mere inches from my own, its onyx eyes staring into my soul.
WE ARE SOVEREIGN
It declared, and the void around us trembled with the truth of its words.
They echoed mightily around even this airless place. The monster tilted its head upwards to the nearest star, raising its millions of arthropodic tendrils towards it in exultation.
“The old king is dead,” it preached in a voice that was the death of suns and species, that carried with it eons of genetic memory, that had seen things so great and terrible that the mere whisper of them nearly destroyed what remained of my mind.
Then it shifted to regard me once more, mandibles clacking with ferocious glee.
“But our reign is just beginning.”
I awoke with a gasp and a curse, this time, thank the Priest, to reality.
I was curled fetally between the thick, lush fabrics of the Dappled Mare’s lavish double bed, now soaked in sweat. My head pounded like steel spikes were being driven mercilessly into it.
The intense migraine was already being taken care of by Draconic Blood, but the fear remained. My room was balmy, temperature controlled, but I shivered all the same, shutting my eyes tight and cursing once more.
“Fuck.”
Not the most eloquent response, but appropriate, I felt.