To begin with, I keep an eagle eye on my Bound as they harvest the Energy-Hearts, both physically and though the Bonds. After a while, I start to relax – I can feel the strong desire both of them have for the Hearts but they seem to be channelling that into harvesting as many as they can. River is using his wooden knife which is far more effective than I would have thought.
Bastet, conversely, is just using her claws. Again, not something I would have expected to have too much effect on what appears to be gemstone. Even my own experimentation proved that the Energy-Hearts don’t react like rubies, though, for all they look like that’s what they are. Bastet is slower than River, but she’s doing well enough. Out of both of them, I’m the slowest since I’ve been more than half-watching the other two.
As for the others, Lathani seems to be trying to copy Bastet, having clearly understood that these things are useful in some way. I see her taking a couple of surreptitious licks. She seems a little undecided seeing as she doesn’t suddenly start licking at one of them with eagerness; neither does she appear to dislike them since she keeps coming back for more at various intervals. As for the other cubs, Trouble and Ninja are playing with one of the harvested Energy-Hearts, batting it away and then running to pounce on it. They seem to have turned it into a bit of a competition – whoever gets to the Heart first wins, I guess. As for Stormcloud, she started by intently watching Bastet, and is now trying to copy her guardian. Not with a huge amount of success, I will admit, but at least she’s trying.
Not wanting to compete with either of my companions, and wanting to have a good view of both of them, I’ve moved further into the cavern and am harvesting a section that’s sticking out a little into the cavern. It’s truly thick with Energy-Hearts so should occupy me for a good while. I almost whistle while I work, thinking about a certain iconic song. Well, if this is the sort of thing dwarves go for, no wonder they’re happy to be off to work! Is this the treasure trove the salamander was guarding? Surely it is! Maybe it even evolved here, since I can’t believe that the fire-breathing lizard could possibly have been born like that. Then again, fantasy often insists that dragons are a real thing: in a world of magic, how can I say for certain that they aren’t?
How cool would it be if River could become a dragon-man instead of a lizard-man? Probably a remote possibility, I conclude, if possible at all. If we can get Bastet to grow wings, that would be awesome enough. That leads me down the question of whether I could evolve. I mean, I didn’t have the reaction to Energy-Hearts that they did, so does that mean I can’t? Or is it that I need something else to do so? Hmm, a question for a later time. My mind musing over such ideas and focusing on harvesting the Hearts, I don’t realise there’s something else present in the area. When I do see it, I forget about everything else.
Tucked around a corner so that I only spot it when I’ve shifted a bit to reach some more Energy-Hearts, I see a shining pool of liquid. It can’t be water – it glimmers and glistens far too brightly to be water. It looks like liquid diamond, the substance reflecting the light of our torches and refracting it to dance around the little alcove. It seems to be picked up by the Energy-Hearts and magnified. Or maybe it’s the light which magnifies the light within the Hearts?
“What is that?” I breathe as I step towards the shimmering and dancing liquid. It draws me in, a whisper to my senses that promises anything and everything. When I stare into the rainbow refraction within its ripples, I almost believe that I can see my mum there. My dad. Lucy. Long-cherished memories of the past dance barely noticeably in the substance. I shuffle forwards, entranced.
I feel like I need only to reach out and touch the liquid and all my dreams will come true. I yearn for it, my body thirsts for this like nothing else. The dryness of my mouth is forgotten, surpassed a hundredfold by the deprivation I feel from only seeing this substance and not touching it. I take a faltering step forward, and then another.
This, this is what I was missing in my life. My eyes are fixated on the visions I only see flickers of. I want to see more, I must see more. I want to make the flickering images into reality and I know that I can...if I only touch the mesmerizing substance.
A sudden sense of warning awakens within me. Wasn’t there a problem about...something...I lose track of my thoughts and push away the caution. What is to be wary about having every single one of my dreams brought to life? To being able to do anything? Instead of being banished, the sense of warning turns into fear, like there’s something inside me that’s trying to pull me back even as the rest of me keeps my feet shuffling forwards.
Barely heard, barely registered, I hear a muffled voice in my mind.
Markus, what are you doing? Markus? Master! stop! Why do I feel fear? I don’t like it. The visions I’m invited into here are dreams, full of care and love, not fear.
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A new wave of fear-tinged panic rolls over me and I flick it away mentally. Like turning a volume dial on a radio down to zero, the voice and emotion vanish. At peace, I bask in the feelings of joy, love, and acceptance emanating from the liquid in front of me. Somehow, I don’t know how, I’ve crossed the cavern from the entrance to the lapping edge of the pool. I’m close enough that I could just reach out and touch...and so I do.
Time elongates – I feel like I’m moving in slow motion. The sense of danger explodes in me, the feeling growing exponentially as my fingers descend towards the inviting liquid-diamond. I hesitate for a moment – what am I doing – but flashes of my mother’s hair, her walnut eyes, her loving smile, catch my attention once more. I crush the feeling of danger as easily as I turned off the voice and panicky emotion earlier.
Time stops as the tips of three of my fingers dip into the surface, covered up to the first knuckle in the dancing, shimmering liquid. The feeling is...indescribable. In one moment, feeling like air moving against my fingertips, in another a thick gel which resists my touch.
For one perfect moment, the world is bliss, like I’m connected to all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be. I feel infinite. I’m at peace because why struggle when I am everything? Why strive when I can will things to be made and unmade with a flex of a thought?
Then, the heavens crack and it’s like Hell has opened up and engulfed me.
An unfathomable something burrows underneath my skin, no, even deeper than that. Into my soul. I’ve never been so certain that I have one until this moment where I know I have one because it’s being shredded. Or melted. Or dissolved.
The sensation starts at my fingertips, but it quickly moves up my fingers, into my hand. I realise that when I thought I was in Hell before, I didn’t know what Hell was. My hand feels like I’ve dipped it into the molten rock I was so worried about earlier, and then decided to throw on some salt just to make sure. No, not salt, pure sodium. No, potassium.
I barely feel it as I’m tackled, hitting the ground hard as I’m crushed beneath a heavy body. My eyes are open, but I’m unseeing. My mouth is hanging wide in a scream that I cannot hear. All I can focus on is the sheer impossible-to-describe agony that is my hand; the rest of the world might as well not exist.
Moments stretch like honey, cloying and sickly sweet. The agony in my hand doesn’t improve; if anything, it gets worse. It feels like there was something in my hand before which isn’t there any more because it got consumed. Worse, it feels like moment by moment, the molten heat expands just a little more, devouring my soul, my body, my entire being a fraction of an inch at a time. Should I cut my hand off?
If it will save my life, I’ll do it, but I hesitate. Cutting my hand off is truly a last resort since, without both my hands, daily life will become infinitely harder. Better than no life, but not by much: I’m not at all sure that I’ll be able to rebuild my hand. I might have been able to fix my eye, but that was more about repairing the damages to it, not rebuilding it entirely. I don’t know enough about the anatomy of a hand to even begin to direct the healing! And without me directing it, what if it just cauterises my wrist or something?
But I have to do something. Every moment I spend agonising deliriously over what to do, I sense that I lose something more of myself. The all-encompassing pain makes it extremely hard to come up with possible ideas, but I have to fight through it. I have to. The other option is not acceptable.
Desperately, I try to use my Lay-on-hands to fix the problem, but the results are not at all what I expected. Strangely, despite all the molten fire rolling around in my hand, there doesn’t seem to be any actual damage. Not physical damage, anyway. However, that’s not to say that my magic doesn’t do anything.
As soon as it makes contact with the mass of something in my hand, there’s an immediate reaction. I hadn’t sent much mana to the area, wanting to test the waters first, so I can’t tell exactly what happened. However, the fact that it did react, tells me something by itself: the mass has to be linked to magic or Energy: why else would it be affected so directly? I latch onto the idea, my mind racing to try to work out how to turn it into a solution.
Wondering whether I could just push the whatever it is out of me directly, I cast Lay-on-hands again, this time using a channelled version. Painstakingly, I feed the healing magic down my arm, for the first time becoming aware of it emerging from some sort of warm glow somewhere inside my chest. Instead of flooding the area with healing, I try to do something similar to when I pushed the poison out of me.
It doesn’t work – the molten mass of stuff in my hand refuses to budge. Worse, it actually seems to grab my strand of mana and pull. It feels like a hungry monster, slurping at a string of spaghetti. The glow in my chest dims significantly as it sucks away at me, half of my mana bar vanishing in an instant. As more and more of my glow is pulled away with inexorable force, I feel myself become weaker and weaker.
When my mana runs out, I watch in horror as my health starts to drain too, stamina disappearing as well, fraction by fraction.