Persepera

The 16th of Thargelion

The Year 4631 in the Era of Mortals

It took an hour for the physician, Polybus, to gather the assistants he’d promised. An hour for which Arche could feel nothing but the drumming of his heart, hear nothing but the blood pulsing through his ears, and think of nothing but the myriad ways in which something could go wrong. The procedure could botch, Hekatonkheires could break in and kill them, he could be blind forever, he could be worse than blind. The thoughts spiraled ever downward, broken by a soft hand taking his. Tess. Her touch was flotsam in the storm of his fear. He was sure she was talking to him, but he couldn’t process anything more than the touch of her skin. With anxiety coursing through him, it was all he could do to just hold her hand.

Pathetic.

He had fought battles, defeated fearsome foes in single combat, and stood his ground against unfathomable entities with immeasurable power, yet the thing that finally unnerved him was sitting in a physician’s bed for an hour, waiting for a service that would help him. It was humiliating. There was no pity in Tess’s touch, however. It was simple reassurance and, for that, he was grateful.

When Polybus returned, Tess and Helwan were ushered out. Someone held a glass to his lips and told him to drink, so he did. His face tingled and went numb; his thoughts became dull and infrequent. After that, it was difficult to tell what exactly was being done to him.

Fingers prodded his face, magic tingled against his skin, and, at one point, something poked at his consciousness, but in his addled state he couldn’t tell if the last was real or was his own mind trying to respond to what was happening. Pain abounded but it existed in a detached sense. It was like a screaming child that had calmed itself into a tearful gurgle. It still demanded attention, but it was not all-consuming in that effort.

At the end of the second hour, Arche was fed another potion. The procedure continued. Prodding, poking, magicking, and, in some instances, cutting. It was exhausting, but the constant stimulation wouldn’t let him sleep. Every touch was underwater, every flash of pain was a distant candle. Arche felt, somehow, wholly separate from himself. His consciousness folded in on itself again and again, too exhausted to remain, and he found himself inside his mindscape.

Even there, his addled senses made things slip and shift, more akin to paint than place, and, for a moment, Arche thought that one of the strange entities had spirited him away for cruel mockery of his condition. The grass beneath his avatar flowed like a river, but it was all an illusion. The color gradient of the grass itself shifted from root to tip, only appearing to be in motion. The ground was solid enough, but that proved little comfort as his conscious avatar could move in any direction.

More than the grass, the walls of his consciousness were disconcerting. The lion’s share was still a collection of mud and sticks but, in his addled state, the walls were moving. At first, he thought it was a simple gradient change, like the grass, but it was more than that. The walls shifted and flowed, creating gaps and holes before plugging them up again. Wherever the gaps occurred, a thin, crimson light filtered through, wisping into his mind like visible wind.

Arche witnessed all of this with a sort of quiet bewilderment. Here, in his mind, he was guarded from the concerns of his body. He was aware of the procedure continuing, but it was a cerebral awareness. His immediate concern was the light filtering through his walls, but this, too, felt distant. Perhaps the potion they’d fed him caused the effect. Arche approached the light. It was brilliant; beautiful in a way that inspired fear. He touched it with a spectral hand and felt energy arc through his mental construct, searing into him.

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

He jerked away, pulling back toward his center. The light was Mana, filtering into his mind. More than that, it was alien Mana, belonging to someone else. Arche tried to focus his consciousness and close the gaps, but as soon as he started exerting his will over the walls, horrible pain gripped him.

The pain didn’t center itself in any one spot. Arche felt it in his avatar, in the grass and walls and sky. He felt it permeate throughout, infecting the whole. The pain gave no thought to the potion coursing through his system, allegedly supposed to keep him from feeling such things. For a moment, Arche thought it might shatter him, then it passed. He looked down at the ever-shifting grass and saw the black striations.

Mana scars.

Arche’s anger rose, swift and terrible. The ceiling of his mental dome, normally blue to reflect the sky, turned a violent orange. The ground shook and Arche’s avatar lifted into the air. He reached out a hand and took hold of the sky. His other hand held the flowing ground beneath. His avatar, a ghostly representation of his physical body, frayed. He was unraveling. His conscious mind was slipping between his mind’s construct and his waking body. Snatches of words fell upon his ears before dissipating into mindless noise.

“Watch—”

“—seizing.”

“Prep—!”

Arche’s rage burned above it all. In the center of his mindscape, deep within the recesses of his Mana pool, the jewel of his Divine Spark burned. Red flared from the orange like cracked glass. It was not a jewel of solid mineral but of oceanic fluctuations that stormed and raged in time with him. The black lines pulsed like necrotized veins. They swelled and shrunk with one another like a living thing.

His avatar fell apart and his consciousness flooded the entire space. Arche forced the broken gaps of his mind to close, tearing the walls where he had to. The only thing that matched his rage at his own impotence was the pain. The walls broke apart, drifting inward and outward to the great negative space between minds. Cracks formed in the ground as he fought against his scars. His Mana was an impediment at every step, but he was not so easily cowed. He dug into the rot and tried to rip away every blackened thing he found. He scratched and clawed with every weapon he could think to conjure, but the scars blunted his attempts at every turn.

Unwilling to admit defeat, Arche delved deep into his Mana, searching for something that would give him the strength to overcome the scarring. The Spark of the Divine. His last vestiges of centralized consciousness formed around the crystal. All around him was power and magic, fury and despair.

Every emotion Arche had ever felt was here, flooding him, influencing him, and foremost among them was rage. He saw the Spark, the crystal, floating in the center of his Mana pool. A blood-orange sphere with tendrils that anchored it to the rest of his mental construct. More than half of the tendrils were necrotized flesh, but some remained healthy and vibrant. Arche grabbed hold of the blackened tendrils with a mind to tear them apart at their source, but before he could bring his rage to bear, a sensation like cold water flooded him, freezing him in place.

He was stuck in thought and time. The orange and red rage of the world faded into a calm blue and a voice that was not his own spoke to him, slow words of comfort.

‘It is all right, friend. You are safe. You are well. Rest easy.’

The voice was old, masculine, and kindly, like a grandfather reassuring a favored grandchild. Arche wanted to fight back, but on a deeper level, he didn’t. The voice promised peace. It reminded him of how tired he was, how tiring it all was. The voice promised sleep.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Hippokrates. You are in my asklepieion. I am here to help you. Will you return to the physical world so we may speak? You’ve the others quite a scare.’

Regret poured through him at the thought of Tess and Helwan waiting, worrying.

‘It’s all right,’ Hippokrates said again. ‘I suspect we have much to talk about.’

The voice went quiet. The mindscape faded to darkness, familiar and ever-present.

Arche opened his eyes.