Cold without temperature, huh?

Ultimately, Randidly walked down through the screen of shadow and entered into a new stage of the endless staircase; honestly, he didn’t have much choice. At this point, he had already committed to the Visage of Obsession. He sunk into the shadow and felt one more piece of himself being restricted, to streamline his pursuit of his goal.

When he left the Fatepiece and returned to the image-world, he spun on a slate-grey stone pillar he had made for this purpose and simply experienced the environment. Randidly could still feel the wind brushing up against him and he felt his hair stand on end, as the tiny follicles usually did when he was exposed to cold, but everything just felt like pressure. Similarly, he pushed his body until he increased his heartbeat and his skin reddened, but he also felt no overwhelming sense of heat.

Randidly quickly calmed his body, lest he interfere with Claudette’s image, and considered this problem very seriously. Well, perhaps the Fatepiece makes a good point about not missing the details by focusing too much on temperature. But it is definitely an overly pretentious point… So, without actually feeling the frigid temperature, what would make a place cold?

What do cold environments have in common? How can I strengthen that feeling here?

Very quickly, the dull ache of his Aether Crossroads took the opportunity to reassert itself; few things had made Randidly feel as cold as the emptiness radiating from the area his connection to Helen had once occupied. Further, the loneliness of thinking of the support she had given him and the current absence left him feeling a definite mental chill.

Randidly raised his head and looked out at the badlands around him with dullness in his emerald eyes. If grief can chill me ravage me with this suffocating sense of loss, then it sure as hell can renovate this whole image into the worst sort of icy blade against the plots of her father…

For the moment, Randidly closed his eyes and allowed the details of the projected world around him to fall away. If he wanted to take this route, physical details wouldn’t be enough. Instead, he used the emotional perception he had honed during his first journey in the Shaft and examined the interior of Claudette’s image through that lens.

For a while, he found… nothing. In a strange mirroring of the empty stretches of dead grasslands and sea Randidly had highlighted above, the emotional aspect of this image was empty. Which was a confusing result, considering that Claudette felt pressured enough to take this desperate gamble.

Aether was the energy of shape and emotion. Claudette was a capable Pinnacle Seeker; she needed strong emotions in her image to have made it this far.

So he kept looking. He scoured the surroundings, feeling the shapes of her chilling image, even if he could no longer experience that biting sensation with his body. The process took so long that Randidly had to pause three times and allow his mind to rest. But now that he understood the way that his own grief could benefit him, a sadistic part of himself enjoyed the torture of the rest breaks.

In those moments, he allowed his mind to drift back to his interactions with Helen. He let his punishingly detailed memory examine all his favorite moments with her. All their spars on Expira and Tellus, plus the exhausting battlefield they shared on the frontlines. Randidly knew that this was the sort of behavior that Neveah would strongly disapprove of, but he didn’t care; a slice of his motivation was to punish himself for allowing Helen to die.

He had found the way he could weaponize his grief. The current Randidly could not resist this chance to turn his greatest failure into a tool he could use to prevent the same thing from ever happening again.

Finally, after scouring the strangely thorned terrain in the interior of Claudette’s image that Randidly hadn’t yet explored physically, he found the faintest trace of emotion. It lingered in those core areas like a crimson ribbing. Its very existence arrested Randidly’s attention.

Claudette radiated intense disappointment in that small whiff of emotion.

And once he had the trail, Randidly rapidly followed the scent back to the core of Claudette’s image. There, he found a deep seed of emotion that had been isolated and frozen in the very heart of the world. Everything else that Claudette eventually built was based on this crystallized nucleus.

Randidly felt strangely timeless as he floated nearer to that horrible frost source. He could not feel cold, but his senses told him that if he could, he would be tortured by the bitter waves of energy around him. After staring in wonder at the tight knot of sealed emotions for quite some time, he belatedly realized that his thoughts must have turned sluggish. He created distance and examined the tightly bound emotions with a more critical eye.

To his brief horror, he felt the familiar shape of Claudette’s guide specter even in that deep place of emotion. She emitted a warning hum, clearly disturbed by his presence there. The childish display from the construct did little to lessen the pervading vibe of horror that it caused in him, but the noise did also drag a smile onto Randidly’s face.

For a while, he simply observed this cornerstone of Claudette’s image. The bound emotions were like a dark stone in a deep pond on a moonless night. He couldn’t quite sense their shape from a distance, but he knew they lurked there, beneath the ripples.

He spoke out loud, despite the fact that the projection watched anxiously as he examined the emotional core. “It won’t feel good. But this can be the source of your strength. That sense of loneliness you’ve bottled up in that frozen sword- that is your vivid power.”

Again, the guide whined at his continued presence here, but Randidly shook his head. This thing didn’t possess any actual intelligence; he could not reason with it. And using that emotional core, he began to see the final shape that Claudette’s image could become.

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Because the way that Randidly could definitely sharpen her image was by highlighting that suffocating sense of isolation that radiated outward and physically froze the surroundings and giving it concrete consequences. He could create a history of ruin that was spawned by her image. On the one hand, it was a callous move, but by creating victims for Claudette’s frigid touch, her image would accumulate depth.

However, that was for later. In this moment, he rolled his shoulders and then once more brought his Grim Intuition within the chilling central area of Claudette’s image. He felt anxiety radiate off of the guide once more as it felt his focus, but Randidly ignored its worries. Instead, he brought his mind to the point where the boundary between shape and emotion blurred. He looked at the suffocating loneliness and disappointment that simultaneously was a blade sunken into the ground that doomed this world to inevitably succumb to the cold.

His thoughts slowed as he approached, but the adjustment to his perception of time kept him lucid. Not that blindly adding weaknesses is ever a good thing, but… an image that rides the wave of a story is stronger than an inert snapshot. In this case, feeling your image, I need to wonder why you stuck this sword into this world and smothered all of the native population.

Perhaps you have hidden deeply, but I doubt you are cruel, Claudette. No, judging by that pained sense of isolation, you are not a native to this world; you are different. You wandered here and you desperately needed to sheath your sword. Randidly felt a deep mental ache as his WIllpower reached out to touched the ‘cold’ that fueled Claudette’s image. The relentless heart of her image was honestly quite impressive. Yet he pushed through the discomfort to adjust a tiny detail. You had no ill will toward this place; but you… like all of us, you are flawed.

Despite the fact that he couldn’t experience cold, Randidly shivered as he brushed his finger along Claudette’s vicious image. All of his mental being funneled his force into that one touch and shifted the image.

Congratulations! Your Skill Conviction of the Celestial Cataclysm (T) has grown to Level 488!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill Conviction of the Celestial Cataclysm (T) has grown to Level 495!

Crack!

Randidly’s breath wheezed out of his throat as he came back to himself. The ground of this projected world began to rumble as the slight flaw he created in the emotional seal started a cascading series of reactions. Sudden the perfect alignment of shape and emotion was slightly off. Through that flaw, emotional miasma entered the world.

Nearby, the abyss-like mouth of the Claudette projection slowly closed. Seemingly in order to maintain its creepiness, each of its eyes widened in proportion to that shift.

RUUMMMMBLLLLLLEEEEEEEE!

Of course, Randidly knew that he was being discourteous to the projection; his shift had altered Claudette’s image more violently than perhaps he had intended. However, he had already taken the critical step. He could not simply shore up that flaw now. Instead, he cleared his throat and vocalized his idea. “Your sword… that seal on your emotions was always flawed. The essence of you had been leaking out through the tiniest crack in your frozen sword. Or perhaps a horrifying ‘other’ exists within that weapon, attempting to escape and slaughter you. This is why you had no choice but to sheath that gloomy weapon within the vulnerable flesh of this world.

“The stone and dirt of the ground is not a complete seal, but it is better than simply allowing that desolation to escape.”

The rumbling of the ground grew more intense. During the resettling of the image world, Randidly didn’t need the spirit guide to tell him which direction the core lay. He could pivot and stare toward the source of the disturbance, his expression slowly twisting as regret solidified in his chest. Was I too impatient in making this change?

RUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMBBBBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEE!

The ground didn’t crack, just shuddered beneath the force of the energies at work.

But almost in answer to his secret fear, Randidly felt a deep blue taint seeping out from the blade of the sealing sword. Randidly’s Grim Intuition could feel the fingers of that existence within the sword reaching outward and working their way deeper into the substance of this world. Randidly hummed to himself and rapidly began to wield his Willpower to deepen the details of the world in response.

The more substance this world possessed, the more that the desolation Claudette hosted could claim as its own.

Perhaps because of how recent the change was, the spreading deep-blue taint soon ran out of steam. The speed of its expansion halted. But when Randidly raised his head toward the sky, he could practically see the horrifying sword breathing, releasing the slightest hint of the doom it carried upward into the grey sky. Randidly’s eyes glittered as he guided those flows into the swirling storms he had already made, fueling the transformation of the image even further.

Congratulations! Your Skil Grand Perspective (R) has grown to Level 124!

Randidly released a breath. His skin still felt completely neutral; the sensation of temperature was now barred to him. Instead, he focused on the creeping accumulation of fear in this world. He twisted and looked back toward the edges of this planet that he had previously been sharpening. If there was originally a race of this world, they would have fled as far from the source of their doom as possible. Or they would have rushed toward it, attempting to solve the problem. Hmmm.

What sort of people were the original residents of this place?

A few remnant tremors shook the ground beneath him. Randidly flexed his toes and savored the grittiness of the dirt on which he was standing. But before he continued, he forced himself to look over at Claudette’s image guide. Its eyes dominated its face, almost transforming its being into a mirror that reflected the worst of Randidly’s fears back at him.

“You alright?” Randidly asked awkwardly. The projection hummed uncertainly. But at the very least, the rumbles became more infrequent as the world adjusted to its new state of existence, where some force imprisoned in a sword dug its fingers into the bedrock of this planet.

Randidly scratched his neck and turned away. “Next the victims to add depth. The creatures who existed here need to play a part in this story. So while Claudette possesses the image of desolation and cold, the original population of this world worship the sun. Perhaps, due to the System’s influence, the being they worship is the Patron of the Sun.”

His eyes rapidly brightened. As though the imagined race already existed, he could feel his rapidly digging up the various details that shaped them. He was surprised by how simple the brainstorming became. “They are called… the Lizakh. Like the people of Tellus, they are a civilization that runs of pride. They worship the sun, so they can be scaled, reptile humanoids. When Claudette’s image first arrived at this place, they retreated from the horrifying cold, assuming that it was just one of the dangerous ice ages spoken of in their ancestral records. But when the cold persisted, spread, and worsened, they finally resolved themselves to do something about it.”

Randidly pursed his lips. “So they selected a champion to lead an expedition to the heart of the threat. Let’s call him… D’min Rrshk.”