Ori reflected on Crucible's words processing how he felt about them. It was a matter of principle to resist the notion of limitations, this idea that anybody could be so easily predicted and categorised. The belief that anyone was capable of anything if given the opportunity had always been a fundamental ideal. However, too much of what the entity he would soon become a guardian spoke of, rang true.

While he would never blindly believe words without evidence, Crucible did possess an uncanny ability to decipher thoughts and emotions or just as likely, flat-out mind-read.

It had taken only thirty-five seconds of incomprehensible technobabble from the entity to convince Ori that Crucible was an incredibly complex machine powered by a magical mind that had used its hundreds of thousands of years of existence to improve both itself and countless others. And while he would never blindly follow it or anyone's advice, he had no problem listening, testing, and incorporating knowledge that worked for him.

It was in that spirit that Ori now wandered the arid plains in his sixth trial attempt. With the lack of company or mental stimulation of any kind, the sudden wealth of things to occupy his thoughts was overwhelming. This wasn’t helped by the unstimulating environment, the landscape itself was bleached white, as if the colour had been baked out of the stone and dirt. He had dreamt of something like this happening to the landscape below as he played snooker with suns.

It was as if this realm was telling him he had drained dry all the resources and vitality, but to be here on the ground walking the endless wastes was something else. Worse still, unlike his astral self which had been able to float above the land and call upon storms like the God of thunder, Ori was back to being his normal, mortal self.

Weak.

He had tried everything, from falling asleep in the trial to clenching his fists and willing something to happen. When that failed, he walked the endless wastelands in search of water. He was well into the second day, long enough for his tongue to stick to the roof of his mouth, his throat to itch and thirst to bite at the edges of his focus before the terminal effects of nausea and dizziness arrived. With no landmarks, let alone life or sources of water in any direction, he decided to sit and think.

As he pondered Crucible's words on his limitations for the umpteenth time, there was one aspect that he kept circling back to. The fact that he would never rule nor be good at lying didn't bother him, nor did the idea of harbouring darkness and light.

Unlike many, he could never afford the self-deception that papered over the fear that he, unlike everyone else, was broken. He had pushed it to the back of his mind, tried to not let it define him, but the truth of this being, the driving force of this personality, the thing that made him, if not unique, then at least different was the fact that he had been abandoned. Had witnessed everyday depravity and cruelty, been subject to abuse and violence, but above all of that, he had been abandoned.

And in return, he had sought nightmares in the tranquillity of dreams.

Whether it was the magic of the trial or his quasi-dreamlike state, the darkness of the void lay before him. It was a portal that warped the very ground, funnelling reality and fate towards it, its centre was a calm disk, featureless beyond varying qualities of darkness. It didn't swirl, it didn't call out to him; it didn’t need to.

Ori stared at it as he held the notion that when he altered himself rather than the world around him, the trial manifested the result.

Embracing this hypothesis, Ori broadened his perspective as he leant closer to the abyss. If this were a realm replete with concealed spaces—regions unreachable due to his own perceived limitations, he would need to change and embrace these weaknesses instead of shunning them.

An errant memory replayed Bruce Wayne surrounded and overwhelmed by screeching bats, before standing and opening up to his fears. With crystalline clarity, he fixed that scenario in his mind, recalling the lessons learnt from the first trial. With an exhale, he leant over and reached out into the void, and then he screamed.

Had his awareness been intact, he would have felt himself hurtling through the primordial darkness. Sparks of chaos, shards of liquid light, fractured atoms of time, geometries and hues unfathomable to mortal comprehension—dismantled and reassembled reason, peeling away all but the primordial and ceaseless Id at the core of his personality.

The dark maelstrom persisted, a disintegrating gale hostile to the very notions of length or volume, past or future, life or death. But the Id endured, transformed yet unyielding—like a child shrieking against the storm, honed by the erosion, fortified by its baptism in oblivion. And then the ID remembered.

It was desire, identity, torment, joy, determination, need.

To become someone new, someone more.

And so, it became.

In this space beyond time, countless eternities passed by as the entity that was, and would one day refer to itself as Ori Suba reassembled itself in the void.

There was no anatomical or biological knowledge underpinning this process, just a soul-deep instinct that it was human, and a process of trial and error over countless iterations.

Even in the abyss, glittering silver specks of Quintessence called to him, granting him access to its transformative power. With it, and under the pressure of the howling void, his spiritual characterists unified; Will fused with Spirit into Intent, Presence fused with Perception into Aura, and Aura fused with Intent into Domain.

Stolen particle by particle, snatched from the quantum arcana of the trial itself, the entity that would later be known as Ori, rebuilt not just the physical body—as such a thing didn't exist in this environment it now knew—but a true astral form that was porous and super-conductive, yet possessed a diamond invariance to the pressures of an uncertain future. Crucible had been right: Ori would never succumb to the shadows, he would not become the void.

However, he had no qualms about using it as fuel.

He forcefully transformed his Nascent Irregular affinity of Light, of creation and change, fusing it with the destructive void and the sparks of Quintessence into something new.

While it could have taken this moment to strip away his flaws, leaving behind an unblemished, human-shaped, crystalline automaton, it valued the aspect it had once called humanity and left the flaws within. The elusive power he sought was gradually incorporated as he was reborn. Although incremental compared to the instinctual changes in his mind and spirit, he grew stronger as he seized particles from the void.

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He continued this process until he resembled a mountain in human form, abundant with substance and ripe with potential for further refinement.

Yet, catastrophe struck when his astral form began to disintegrate once more. The relentless gales of the night and the howls of the abyss tore away his newfound flesh faster than he could rebuild it.

As time stretched endlessly within the void, the reserves of the focus sustaining Ori's will dwindled. He knew that, despite the trial's rules and mechanics, a true, final oblivion awaited him should he fail and be destroyed in this place. Thus, he altered his approach. Instead of striving to remain solid and invulnerable to the forces of the abyss, he allowed himself to be swept away, focusing his energy on maintaining contact with the fragments that had been torn from him. The image he had formed before, of Batman embracing his fears and surrendering to the nightmares, shone brightly once again.

Here lay the nightmares Ori's mastery of dreams had once concealed. Facing the prospect of oblivion due to never fully acknowledging the entirety of his being—both the light and the shadows within—Ori exposed himself to these deepest fears and phobias unhindered:

A particular type of claustrophobia, triggered by wearing a mask one Halloween, made it difficult for him to breathe. A hot spike of fear caused sweat to form beneath his shirt as panic overrode sense. His heart rate and breathing rocketed to hyperventilation. Vision that was already compromised, narrowed. Unable to remove the stuck mask, its straps caught and tangled in his hair.

Ori remembered being stabbed, blood staining his tracksuit bottoms, blood coating his phone as he called 999 from a bus stop. The rage of being disrespected and betrayed by those who called him bruv, the crippling sadness of dying completely alone after living a meaningless life.

Ori recalled the first beings he had killed, their demonic bodies now bloated and grotesque, with salt and pepper filaments decomposing the flesh in real-time. The unrestricted horror of their murder by his hands struck him as he saw the blood-covered shiv fall from his grasp before a bloom of fungus sprouted from his hands. The painful itch intensified as more spores burrowed into his skin. He screamed as his skin peeled, discoloured, and became pus-filled, before abyssal parasites consumed him from within.

Ori found himself in a scuffle outside a nightclub with some troublemakers. It was typical argy-bargy with crew members looking to cause a scene. On his own, Ori might have been able to de-escalate the situation with a few bruises and a dent to his pride. However, Diane, his date, was screaming. He yelled at her to run, but unfortunately, she had other ideas.

"Shut dat bitch up before she calls the feds," was all Ori heard as he was pinned to the ground and stomped on the back of his neck.

A thousand and one similar scenarios, and worse, played out in a procession of personal catastrophes he couldn't avoid. But then, more benign torments revealed themselves: the idea that those who had treated him well—his friends and what relatives he had met—did so out of pity and obligation; that he had nothing of worth to offer anyone, or he a fundamental flaw within him. That there was some part of him he lacked that others had, which meant he would never find love or understand happiness with a family of his own.

For most of his life, he had buried that fear beneath a cloak of independence, accepting that if he were to be alone for the rest of his life, then so be it. In the post-pandemic world, being alone was the new normal for many, and he hadn't been particularly outgoing or extroverted to begin with. Perhaps he preferred solitude? Why long for things beyond his control? Why desire something he was clearly unsuited for?

"Hmmm? This is certainly a surprise," spoke a sweet, refined and distinct voice Ori would never forget.

"Mel?" Ori said, finding himself back on the streets of Peckham, the same drizzle-soaked evening as when he was abducted.

"Is this your doing, my light?" Mel asked with an air of wonder as she walked around, eyes sweeping over the scene as if it was all new and foreign to her. "This is your dreamcrafting, isn't it, and you have somehow pulled me in here? Just who have I caught, Ori? Or are you even still where I left you?" Mel said, and instead of the expected anger or reproach, she seemed delighted, perhaps even proud.

"This is really you, isn't it? I mean, I’m not just dreaming about you, am I?"

"I could ask the same question." Mel came closer, her ruby eyes glistening in the streetlights, her delicate hands which Ori knew held so much strength, glided down his arm. He remembered that living nightmare, of being paralysed and impotent, of being knocked around like a chew toy, but he didn't flinch away nor break his gaze. "Except you feel different? Not like I remembered... Oh, I know!" She continued, her eyes brightening as if finding out the answer to a riddle. "You've somehow escaped and gone into the Crucible, haven't you?" And she smiled wider as Ori couldn't help but twitch at the tendril of worry that his location was no longer a mystery.

"Don't worry, it'll be our little secret. I'm actually curious how far along The Path you will go. Oh yes, I noticed even then. I wondered what would happen if I took you, and kept you. Would you somehow escape? Would you dispose of this worthless infernal at the first opportunity? Or would you somehow twist the fates into taking me with you?" Mel said with a smile that was one part wistful for every two parts sardonic.

His prior anger at being assaulted and abducted was being twisted and confused by just the sight of her. "You said you needed my soul, you only want to feed off me, don’t you? You don't want me. Do you even know how to want someone?"

Mel simply smiled as if every barb or slight slid off her Teflon-coated skin. "I'm willing to find out," she said with an earnestness that caught him off guard, coming even closer to wrap her arms around his shoulders, to kiss the side of his neck. For now, Ori let her. "Let me tell you a secret," she whispered. "In here, you could do anything you wanted to me. Touch me wherever you wanted, fuck me however you wanted, you could make me yours. I'd be completely powerless, nothing could stop you from punishing me like the bad little demon that I..."

Ori sighed, stepped back, and observed a frozen Mel whose static expression mirrored that of a greater succubus at the pinnacle of her seductive abilities. With his newfound knowledge, the notion of her being powerless, even in a realm where he reigned supreme, rang hollow, for he was now aware that everyone possessed weaknesses and blind spots, critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited like a virus. The discovery that he longed to be desired took him aback more than it ought to have. Yet, as with all secrets concealed as long and as deeply, once they surfaced, to ignore them and refuse to confront and ultimately accept them as part of one's self could only lead to soul-deep discontent.

"See you around, Mel," He waved, and in the next moment, she was gone. Nevertheless, as the dream faded, Ori was oddly certain he would see her again.

With each nightmare and truth unveiled, Ori increasingly absorbed the void. He started to grasp its capacity for lies and self-deception, as well as its overwhelming potential to instil fear and self-doubt. However, he recognised an honesty within the darkness he was ready to embrace. That he was still human, still a complex amalgam of conflicting virtues and vices, that he was a being of the material where all power came from the transition between heat and cold, light and dark. No matter how profound and transformative the powers of light and creation were, he would also need a destructive balance that could be found only in the abyss. Nevertheless, understanding this only marked the beginning of a long journey.

As this transpired, his once-mountainous form coalesced and then condensed. Flaws ran deep like fissures beneath his darkened flesh, while light danced on his skin like glistening freckles. His formerly brown eyes now appeared black, encircled by a golden-silver corona of glitter at the edges of his irises.

All matter even remotely connected to magic was haphazardly snatched from the void and compressed into his astral bones, organs, and flesh, disregarding the potential risks suggested by the knowledge his bond with Freya provided. That bond itself was curiously fortified, intensified to a degree that baffled both him and Freya—who, despite the aeons and distances that lay between them, consented and contributed to the process.

His understanding of the void, the Abyssal demi-plane, the infinite expanse of shadow, the eternal darkness, and the realm of nightmares and fear merged with and transformed his power over dreams. He could almost sense his affinities evolving.

Wonder and a sense of inner peace arose from the knowledge that he had done everything possible to grow and with a flex of his will, Ori departed from the trial for the sixth time.