I wandered about in the place inside my mind where I used to meet Xoris before he acquired the ability to talk to me when I was awake.

I was disappointed at myself. I was aiding Xoris and Mintuk in their battle against the Alliance of the Gods. This was no good. I was losing my ability to say ‘no’ to anything Xoris asked me to. I was afraid of the pain he inflicted on me. Now I was afraid that he would ask me to do something really horrid and I would follow his orders without the least resistance. I would then truly become a puppet of his.

I couldn’t let that happen. But what could I do? A word came to me, one that I had not thought about it a while.

Gardening.

Gardening was the only way I could muster up the courage to say ‘no’ to Xoris and make myself capable of taking the pain he was bound to give me if I said ‘no’. But I couldn’t garden when I was awake. Xoris would think it odd if I suddenly closed my eyes in the middle of a chore and let my mind wander.

But could I garden in my sleep… right now?

Well, it was worth a try for sure.

I began to imagine my garden, and as I did this, something extraordinary happened. The place that I was in transformed into my garden! I could see all my plants in a kind of vivid detail that I had never seen them in any of my past gardening sessions.

So, gardening was possible when I was sleeping! I should have tried this out earlier.

But then I realised that most of my trees had shrunk in size. Then there was my tree of determination, which had earlier attained maturity resulting in me receiving the rabbit spell. The tree still bore fruits, however the fruits were all shrivelled and the trunk of the tree had lost considerable girth and was oozing pus from several tumour-like outgrowths on the bark, making the tree look like it had caught some disease. Earlier, I had used my tree of determination for the purpose of saving Rozy. I had accomplished that purpose. However, I needed the tree now for the new purpose of dealing with Xoris.

I watered the tree of determination.

“Become healthy,” I told it, “tomorrow when Xoris’s orders me to do things that I do not want to do, you must stand strong. It will be tough, but we are not going to bow to Xoris again.”

I thought about the three gods and the warriors that I myself had put in the dungeons. I felt bad for them. Tomorrow I would free them from the dungeons. It will be painful beyond anything pain I had known, but I must take it. When the Alliance came to attack us, I would ask the three gods to stop them. There should at least be one god in the Alliance who could free me from Xoris, and I would seek their help. The entire while Xoris would be inflicting tremendous pain on me, but I prayed that I would be able to move my lips to convey my words to the gods.

***

It was a light touch on my nose, and not pain inflicted by Xoris that woke me up.

I imagined that the person touching me was Rozy.

“How did she get here!” Xoris yelled inside my mind. It was only then that I properly woke up with a start, jerking my head such that Rozy had to step backwards in order to avoid getting hit by me. If Xoris could see her, then it meant that she was real!

Why, Rozy was not the only one near me. There were Lia, Dani, Slia and even King Ian! So they came all the way in search of me? I felt a rush of gratitude from them.

“Why did you come here?” Ian asked. “Is it Xoris who made you come here?”

I nodded.

“Enough of this!” Xoris said, “They are not going to stop me. Kill them all!”

“Kill them?” I laughed at Xoris, “You think I will kill them?”

“Oh, you must,” Xoris said. And the next moment, my entire being was caught by pain. I gritted my teeth and I thought of the determination tree in my garden.

“That is not enough for you?” Xoris asked. “Then take more.”

The pain doubled. I felt my body shuddering with the pain. My wives and Ian looked at me with much concern, at a loss what they should do to help me.

“Come on! Move your big limbs and squash them!” Xoris yelled inside my mind. He tripled the pain. Tears welled in my eyes.

“Is Xoris doing something to you?” Lia asked, stepping close to me and putting a hand on my paw. I nodded and flinched at the same time. I wanted Lia and the others to stay away from me. I didn’t know how long I would be able to have control over myself and prevent myself from hitting them. The pain I was experiencing was unbearable.

I felt like I was going to pass out.

“Look, you-you can make me fe-feel all the pain you want, but I am not hitting them,” I told Xoris.

In response, Xoris increased the pain further.

“Just hit one of them, go for king Ian if you are not capable of killing your wives right now, and I will half the pain you are feeling,” Xoris said. I barely knew Ian, and I was almost ready to hit him, but I reminded myself that he had stuck with my wives and had probably helped them a lot to come to this place, when he could have left them and gone his way.

Instead of hitting Ian with my massive paw, I deactivated the Monsterification spell. The hall seemed to grow larger as I shrunk in size.

“You bastard!” Xoris yelled. The pain he made me experience next seemed to make my vision black out. While I could see some rough shapes, I couldn’t quite make out what they were. All I knew was the overpowering pain. All sounds also seemed to disappear. I felt the cold floor of the hall against my face. And then came a distant echo. It was Ian’s voice.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“I’ve… got… an… idea!”

A new notification appeared in my vision. I was in so much pain that I struggled to read whatever was written in the notification, and could only make out a few words.

Bear… pain. Put Xoris… in mental dungeon.

Would you… accept quest?

Yes/No?

“Don’t you dare select it!” Xoris said, his voice crystal clear though I could hear nothing else properly.

I selected ‘yes’. I figured as long as I did whatever Xoris didn’t want me to do I should be okay.

The moment I selected ‘yes’, a new pop up appeared in my vision. I could read this one much better.

You are at level 7 of the max pain that Xoris can inflict on you. He can inflict pain up to level 10. If you are able to bear the pain of the remaining three levels without losing consciousness, then Xoris would forever be put into a dungeon inside your mind, from where he would have absolutely no influence on you. Be warned that in level 8 and above, your body will be little under your control and you might do things that can harm yourself and others near you. If you lose consciousness in the process due to the pain, then you would feel extreme exhaustion once you wake up and it is unlikely that you will ever be able to maintain your consciousness after level 5 pain. As such, you will be a slave to Xoris and his pain for the rest of your life. Also, you would not be able to deactivate any spell that you have on until you either lose consciousness or Xoris has been put into a mental dungeon.

So this was like an only chance?

Then an icon appeared in my periphery vision, indicating that I was currently at level 7 pain, and had been so for the past four minutes.

“So I just need to make you lose, consciousness, eh?” Xoris said. “For once, I am happy that Ian should give you this quest and that you should accept it. Poor guy, he can create quests, but he has to put limitations on the quests that he creates because he has only a little knowledge from the Three Holy Books left in him.”

The next minute passed and now I was in level 8 pain. It was many times worse than the level 7 pain. I felt myself lose control on my muscles and they were making jerking movements on their own. I was throwing my arms in random direction. Briefly, I seemed to regain control of my vision. I saw Slia’s face not far away from me and she looked horrified. I looked down at my legs and they were taking me in random directions.

Dizziness was coming over me and I did not know if I would last a minute more. Just then, my hand which had been merged with the lightning device since yesterday night fired a bolt of lightning on its own, such that the bolt of lightning barely missed Ian. Darn it, I should have deactivated the merge spell before accepting the quest to put Xoris into a mental dungeon. I forced myself to keep my eyes open and not to let the dizziness take over, even as the pain made me regret why I was still alive.

I fired another bolt and this struck the floor right in front of Dani and she was thrown backwards by the explosion even as chunks of the floor flew in different directions. I tried to raise my arm, to point it towards the top of the hall, so that even if it fired more lightning bolts of random strengths, then my wives or Ian would not be harmed. But my arm was not in my control. I could just not will it to move upwards.

I felt the arms of a woman grab me around the waist. I knew it was one of my wives. Lia, Dani and Slia were in front of me, so it had to be Rozy.

“Chain me,” I begged her and it was a wonder that I could at least control my tongue.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Rozy said, even as she unsuccessfully tried to control me with her arms, only to be dragged in random directions that my legs were taking me.

“I am already hurting!—”

The icon in my peripheral vision began to show that I was in level 9 pain now. My tongue could as well have been a slab of granite now and I could control it no more. As for the pain that I was in, I should have exploded. My throat was making a strange sound that I recognised was some form of a cry. Meanwhile, the movement of my arms and legs were becoming more unpredictable. I began to shoot lightning bolts all about me, not caring where the bolt struck.

I saw as Lia had to throw herself to the air to avoid being struck. She hit against a wall badly. I realised that Rozy’s arms were no longer around me. She had let go.

And then I felt something strong around my right leg. When I looked down, I saw that it was bound by a thick chain. And then another chain came from nowhere and bound my other leg, preventing me from moving randomly all about the hall of the castle.

But that did not stop my upper body from moving involuntarily. It became even more uncontrollable.

“Why don’t you just give up?” Xoris’s voice said inside my head. “I am actually beginning to feel pity for you.”

“You are going to the dungeon,” I promised him.

“Let’s see,” Xoris said.

The dizziness was getting stronger, and my eye lids were falling. It was a struggle to keep them up, even as I kept firing all the lightning bolts. One thing I knew was that the hall of the castle was all covered in debris and my wives and Ian were covered with wounds they had received from the flying debris.

Rozy’s chains abruptly let go of my legs. My out of control legs took me straight and slammed me face first against a wall. Red blood dribbled down my forehead.

“Why did you do that!” I heard Slia cry.

“Sorry!” Rozy said and from her voice she sounded horrified at what she had done. “I was just trying to get a better hold of him.”

After slamming me against the wall, my legs once again took off in a different direction. But before they could slam me against yet another wall, I felt cold chains contact my torso and the next moment I knew that I had been lifted to the air by one chain while the other chain was wrapping itself around me such that my arms were getting bind to my body and I could no longer throw the lightning bolts. The chain also wrapped around my legs, stopping them from further movement.

Below me I saw Rozy, panting as she held me up in the air with the chains that were extensions of her arms. She had a cut on her forehead and dust stuck to her face and body. Ian was sporting a bleeding shoulder. Dani’s knee was gory, while Lia and Slia were covered in small and large cuts and bruises all about their bodies. The hall was very much a mess.

My eye lids were getting heavier, but with great determination I kept them open, even as I suffered the last minute of the level 9 pain.

“You can take some pain, eh?” Xoris said to me. “But your efforts are going to vain with what’s coming next.”

The icon in my peripheral vision showed that I was in level 10 pain.

Immediately my eye lids dropped. They were the only part of my body that I had still controlled and now they were out of my influence too. Meanwhile, the level 10 pain took me to a different universe entirely and I lost all track of space and time. The only things I knew anything about were the pain and the frantic struggles of my body to break free of Rozy’s chains.

I had accepted defeat, when suddenly my eyes opened. I had not opened them. Ian’s fingers were keeping them open.

“I am not letting you to become Xoris’s slave for eternity,” he said to me, “without you I would still be covered in spider webs.”

But keeping my eye lids up were not enough for me to outlast the pain. My vision was getting dimmer and dimmer, and stars were appearing. The icon in my peripheral vision indicated that there were still two minutes left of the level 10 pain.

Those two minutes were going to be the longest in my life. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The pain itself was so intense that it seemed to stop paining altogether. Warmth took over and the only discomfort I experienced was a dull throb all about my body and even it seemed to be slowly fading. I knew I was slipping away into unconsciousness. But there was nothing that I could do. I tried to keep looking at Ian’s face, but his face became blurry and his face seemed to merge with the ever increasing darkness in my vision.

Finally there was only one minute left. I could still see what I thought was Ian’s pink nose, but other than that there was nothing in my vision except blackness. And then Ian’s nose was gone to. The icons in my vision faded away. A distant cry occurred somewhere and I thought the voice sounded very much like Xoris’s.