Oh, the pain.

It was a difficult thing to describe.

Beyond a certain point, pain becomes immeasurable. It morphs and mutates from a physical affliction to a metaphysical experience, an abominable and all-consuming…thing.

I thought I’d understood this. I thought I’d understood pain.

Somewhere along the still-haunting journey of self-mutilation, somewhere between being brained by Flange and mangled by the mimic knight, I thought I’d seen, well…everything there was to see. Of pain.

How arrogant I’d been. How naive. I’d known nothing.

What I’d felt was a mere twitching of nerves, an sparse, eclectic collection of signals dispatched by organs and extremities ever so far away. Real pain, true pain, soul-pain existed only in the mind.

And it could never be understood.

Such a rigorous, scientific, academic process could never be applied to something as ancestral, as ubiquitous, as essential as pain. The pain I now felt was in no way natural, but that didn’t matter. It was an impossibly fundamental and dreadfully existential anguish that so wildly surpassed anything I’d encountered thus far that all became incomparable.

It was one hundred iron knives, dull and rusted, that flensed me, skinned me, cut me apart piece by bloody piece.

It was one thousand steel needles driving mercilessly into the soft spots beneath my nails, and ears, and eyes, and twisting.

It was one million bulbous worms burrowed into my flesh, gorging on my vital organs, jerking and flailing underneath my skin, gnawing on naked nerves.

Soul-pain was every nightmare, every torture, ever unpleasant thing I could possibly imagine. As soon as I imagined something worse, it was that, too.

And it never faded.

There was no getting used to soul-pain. It didn’t affect my body, only my mind, and would continue for just as long as I did. It couldn’t be accustomed to.

It was, and it would forevermore be.

It wracked me from tip to toe. Each and every muscle fired constantly, epileptically, whipping me back and forth. My ethereal body spasmed uncontrollably upon the dry, cracked, cratered ground that had once been the bottom of my ocean.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think. My eyes rolled about madly in their orbits. My mouth hung open in a constant, silent wail. I prayed for salvation, but none spoke back to me.

I screamed until my throat was dry and still I did not stop.

Nothing.

I plead, apologizing again and again for my sins in some perversion of confession. In truth, even now, I didn’t know why exactly my attempt had gone so terribly awry, but I begged forgiveness all the same.

Nothing.

I sobbed, crying out for Mom, for Ewan, for Fang, even for my father. For anyone who might save me.

Silence.

After long enough, I cried out for death, too.

But I could not die in this place.

So I continued.

My pleas were useless, meaningless. I sought treaty with a creature that did not exist, with a concept, not an entity.

Pain was merciless.

It could not be bought, bartered, or bargained with. There was nothing I could give, nothing I could offer, nothing I could do. None were punishing me. My suffering was a result of my actions alone.

And no one was here to help me.

But what choice did I have? Death was not a mercy granted to me, and doing nothing was the most painful of all. Holding fast to the pretend notion that my disembodied agony was, in truth, some manner of intelligent creature bent on my torment gave me comfort, so I did.

Time passed.

Or, at least, I thought it did. I didn’t really know. I’d no method of keeping it, and was perpetually plunged in and out of consciousness. Constant suffering made such things lose all meaning.

Seconds turned to hours, to days, to years, to centuries, and those centuries turned back into seconds.

It could have been an eternity.

It could have been no time at all.

I began to lose my mind.

The pain never dulled, not even a little bit, but slowly, gradually, over seconds that were eons or eons that were seconds, the relentless agony became too much for my abused psyche to bear. And as the cracks in my consciousness grew, as reality and memory warped and blurred together, they brought with them a measure of…relief.

Desperate, hoarse screams softened to tremulous laughter as my sanity fell apart piecemeal. And though the omnipresent Pain still consumed me, to the exclusion of all else, some small part of myself returned to occupy itself with a single, all-important task.

Find a way out of here.

A shaking arm jerked outwards, spasming madly.

Fingers tremulously contorted to claws dug desperately into barren earth.

Inch by inch, I began to drag myself forwards.

My fingernails could not truly crack and shatter, nor my phalanges themselves grow sore-filled and bloody. But I felt they did. I felt them do so time and again.

I felt the skin-crawling shiver of dirt and rock grinding against fingers worn down to the bone, little stones and loose pebbles mashing into exposed nerve endings, driving deep into butchered flesh.

The pain was excruciating, but nothing compared to the backlash that still consumed my soul, so I did not stop. I dared not stop. I dared not discover what might happen to me were I to simply lay here, within my desiccated inner sea, forever. Would I eventually die, or simply be tortured for eternity?

I did not know, but I feared terribly to find out.

So inch by bloody inch, breadth by agonizing breadth, I dragged myself forward. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what I was doing. The pain had made me blind, and deaf, and dumb. Still, I continued.

And then, I felt it.

The nubs that were once my fingertips, now long worn away, splashed into something. A tiny pool of pure, bright, blue-green Entropy. Perhaps the last sole drop remaining in my sea.

My eyes widened, my mouth moistened, and I lunged for it.

I shoved my nose so hard against the bone-dry earth that it shattered into pieces. I unhinged my jaw so wide it nearly dislocated. Like a ravenous wolf happening finally upon a kill, I bit deep into the arid soil surrounding the tiny, glistening liquid and swallowed it whole.

Relief.

I wept.

The mere morsel of wondrous, beautiful, life-giving, world-saving Entropy suffused me.

It pervaded my ethereal form from tip to toe, racing through my veins like arcane electricity, bringing with it the single most amazing thing imaginable.

Relief from the pain.

I bent double, forehead still pressed into the parched-solid ground, shaking arms clasped tight to one another, weeping hysterically as the soul-pain grudgingly retreated. It did not depart me entirely, merely subsiding to levels perhaps double what I’d suffered after over-exerting myself in the seventh room, but that was enough.

That was more than enough.

Trembling violently as a newborn babe, I raised myself to weak, wavering legs, and took in my surroundings. My inner sea had once been a breathtaking, magnificent place, thick with Entropy and lush with life.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Now, it was a wasteland.

My fault.

Emptiness dominated the horizon. In every direction, there was nothing but battered, broken seabed. The sole landmark, far off in the distance, was the wreck of a ruined volcano, and I began to limp towards it.

Slowly, wearily, I hobbled across the desiccated earth.

The life-saving droplet of Entropy I’d encountered was never replicated, not once. As such, the pain never reduced to a more tolerable level. Progress was a greuling, dismal affair, made all the more torturous by my immaterial physical circumstances; my body felt real, yet wasn’t.

I was exhausted, yet could not sleep. I was wounded, yet could not heal.

Ravenous hunger and choking thirst plagued me, but would never truly threaten my life. My limbs might grow heavy as lead, and ache terribly, but they would never completely fail.

My fault.

Though I didn’t fully understand how, or why, I knew this devastation was my fault. High off my accomplishments in the sixth room, my ability to condense words and images into power, I’d thought myself capable of experimenting with the real thing.

But my achievements, remarkable though they may have been, were those of a child finger-painting in the dark. My Shards, my true Shards, were the work of a maestro. An incomprehensible mind.

The Entropic backlash brought about by my haphazard attempts to manipulate them had wrought apocalypse upon my soul. That my sea was drained, barren, and cratered was no surprise to me, but the raw extent of devastation had thus far eluded me. The raging volcano that had once been Draconic Blood was dark and silent in the far distance, turned from living thing to obsidian mausoleum.

The sky overlooking its massive girth was clear, too, Flash Step absent entirely. Far above the clouds, I could just make out weeping rips and tears in space itself, the fabric of my soul damaged to the point of decomposition.

Reaching out, I couldn’t even feel Fang’s presence, and that hurt most of all.

My fault.

The pain may have lessened, but my nightmare had just begun.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I could do. Entropy was my lifeblood, in this place especially. Without it, I couldn’t call upon my Shards, query their status, perhaps rouse them back to life. I couldn’t manipulate my surroundings, influence my soul. I couldn’t even fly, or summon my Grimoire.

Last time I’d visited this place as a King, a God.

Now I was merely human. Less, even. Mundane. A stranger in a strange land, that I’d been foolish to once think my own. I felt naked. I glanced down.

I was naked.

My ethereal body remained pristine, reflecting none of the grievous physical trauma inflicted upon me in the outside world. But, in this place, my clothing had been made of pure Entropy. Now that my soul was empty, it’d evaporated right alongside everything else.

There was no sun up above, only a tapestry of glimmering stars, none close enough to grant me warmth. Drained of life, my soul was slowly cooling.

Growing ever closer to death.

It’d take hours to reach my Brute Blessing’s remains.

I wrapped my arms about my bare chest, and shivered as I walked.

My fault.

~~~

A trembling hand, its fingertips turned dull blue-grey by frigid cold, rose over the edge of smooth obsidian cliffs to reach an onyx shore.

It clawed, and clenched, and heaved, and was eventually followed by another, and a head, and chest, and body, all tumbling clumsily after it.

I gasped for breath, drawing in deep breaths of thin, barely-nourishing air, and watched it condense into clouds of fine white mist. Collapsed flat on my back after the harrowing climb, I stared up at the fractured sky.

The tears in my soul had grown wider, and the temperature dropped accordingly. I could no longer feel my lips, my fingertips, or my toes. Much to my dismay, and thanks to my newfound nakedness, I’d swiftly learned this ethereal body to be anatomically correct when another far more precious and painful body part numbed, as well.

I tried hard not to think about it.

I might not be able to take literal damage in this place, and so knew not if the frostbite was capable of killing me, yet the dropping temperature was worrying all the same. No doubt, it signified some metaphysical, temporally-dilated representation of my true body’s rapid death back in the eighth room.

Staggering to my feet, I examined the mutilated corpse of what had once been Draconic Blood.

Now standing upon its onyx shores, I could tell the damage was even worse than what I’d beheld from afar. The volcano had split open, cracked in half, perhaps by some massive, terminal fulmination dispensed from on high courtesy of Flash Step’s death throes.

My Brute Blessing was dark and dead, the last of its magma solidified long ago. I felt naught of Personal Storage, deep below, nor the two roughshod runic constructs I’d made of Lesser Levitation and Sensory Projection.

There was nothing here.

I grimaced, grief and failure gripping at the edges of my face, tugging at the innards of my chest.

What could I do now? Where could I go? I’d have to return to the ruins of my sea. Perhaps there were a scant few more droplets left in there, somewhere. I’d have to search for them, scrounge for them, hope they might be enough to save me before my soul froze, wizened, and wasted to nothingness.

It was the only option I had left.

I took one last look at Draconic Blood’s corpse before shaking my head, and turning away. From the corner of my eye, a tiny dot graced my vision.

Instantly, my head snapped towards it.

There, on nearly the opposite side of the volcanic plateau, entirely at odds with its defunct surroundings, sat a small, wooden cabin. A plume of smoke wafted weakly up from its single stone chimney. It was thin, it was reedy, barely visible and downright anemic, but it was undeniably there.

My heart skipped a beat.

I took off towards it.

My pain had been temporarily forgotten, or perhaps overridden by the overwhelming, long-lost sensation of hope now lighting up my brain. I sprinted across glassy sheets of obsidian shale, bounding over razor-sharp rocks as I prayed to every God at once, and the Priest for good measure, that salvation might lie within.

I reached the thick, wooden door, grasped its handle, and threw it open.

In an instant, I was greeted by a swell of blissful warmth and a familiar scene. A simple, humble hearth glowed wanly from within a wrought-iron fireplace. I choked out a sob of joy and staggered towards it, falling to my knees before its wondrous, comforting heat, the gnawing cold infesting my limbs finally driven away.

The embers glowed softly, weakly orange as I held out shaking palms towards them, but they were alive! They were here! My cabin was still here, my Fire was still here!

How, in the High Priest’s holy name, was it still here?

My mouth hanging slightly open, my hands still extended deliriously towards the hearth, I looked around.

The cabin was just as I remembered it. Just as I’d created it.

A rustic, rural homestead filled with plain trappings and spartan decor, little wooden bits and bobs of rough furniture and cheap cookery, worn books and yellowed curtains, unremarkable entirely save for the fact they’d somehow weathered the surrounding apocalypse.

Reluctantly, I rose to my feet, forsaking the Fire, eyes roving about wildly for whatever might explain its presence within my shattered soul, for absolutely anything that could possibly be out of place.

There.

At the very center of the cabin’s cramped but cozy confines stood a simple, unimpressive wood table. The table was unsurprising. After all, I’d dined on it for nearly my entire life. I remembered it well.

But resting lightly atop its misshapen boards was something that had never existed before, something I knew with absolute certainty that I had not personally spawned.

A single piece of paper.

Unsteadily, I approached it.

The page was ancient, faded, tattered, and falling apart. I didn’t dare touch it for fear it might disintegrate. Likewise, the writing upon it was faint, seemingly etched decades, or perhaps centuries ago, and difficult to discern besides.

It was a scrawling script, scrabbling across ancient papyrus, written in such a way that it seemed to be ever-slithering back and forth. The dreaded soul-pain flared up once more as I attempted to comprehend it, the arcane script fighting me for every character I managed to gruelingly decipher.

But after an eternity of agony, Pain would not stop me now.

As stinging tears streamed from my eyes, and hot blood trickled from my nose and ears, the first words entered my mind.

Foolish Host.

My spine straightened, and my head snapped back. My surroundings dimmed, darkened, and disappeared. All else was forgotten as something great and terrifying fixed its gaze upon me. The vision of an overwhelming presence, an antediluvian mind.

A unimaginably vast, bone-white and blood-red centipede.

An alien Sovereign.

Twice now, you ignore me. Twice now, you disrespect me.

Spurn my warnings, then beseech my aid.

See what ruin your misbegotten self-importance breeds.

I should let you squirm.

Though I could no longer see them, the written words forced their way into me, squirming past ears and nostrils, cracking bone and pulping grey matter, worming into my mind.

Though there was no sound, yet the voice spoke to me all the same.

You trifle with forces beyond your pathetic, fleshy cognition.

You cling to antique notions of companionship, of camaraderie.

When we have no need of friends.

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. It felt like sandpaper chafing against my ears.

And yet, I recognized it.

Ours may be a partnership, but do not delude yourself into thinking us equals.

I am not some dog at your beck and call.

I may be compelled to save your life, but that is where my duties end.

If it did not mean my death as well, I would have let you suffer for eternity.

I knew what it was. I knew who it was. Its furious rage and sneering arrogance were familiar to me, nostalgic of a cosmic creature who’d tormented me long ago, in a nightmare during my first night in the City of Shields and Spires.

At long last, ADMINISTRATION spoke to me.

But we do not have eternity.

Our time is limited.

You seek my power?

Fine, then.

Come and take it, little Host.

Come and take it, little Hero.

Prove to me that my progenitor Named you well.

As the Noble Shard’s final words ravaged their way through my mind, my surroundings dissolved into a miasma of light and color.

And, at long last, my Trial began.