It was becoming pretty clear to me that I was a lost cause, just like everything else.

Merritt? Doomed, because of me.

Kreston and Joe-Bob and all the other ghosts? Doomed. Also because of me.

Cassius and the others? Also doomed, and, again, all due to yours truly.

My track record was an ever-growing series of spectacular failures. I considered going back to the Divulgence terminal, but eventually decided against it. Given my current tossing average, I’d probably end up overloading the Digital Priest system and causing it to crash.

Tossing average was the average number of goals a professional frisbee player hit from or behind center field over the course of their career.

It’s not like the Digital Priest system was designed to dole out advice for what to do when you were turning into a magical wyrm in the Last Days and being recruited to fight against the armies of Hell, when you were. I could just picture the error message—and, what did you know, my hyperphantasia did it for me. The text appeared in a blue screen that popped into existence in the middle of the air:

Error 404: Theology not found.

I dismissed it with a wave of my hand, my fingers tearing the image into wisps of vanishing fog.

Guilt was something of a national pastime. That, and eating fast food—but I repeat myself. When your religion’s central dogma was that human beings had tainted themselves with an insurmountable propensity to sin, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that guilt was a fundamental component of your society’s psyche. We were a nation of basket cases—proudly made in the UPT. In that respect, I was basically the poster child for national guilt. But, hey, I wasn’t particularly prideful, so I wasn’t a complete wash, right?

Who am I kidding…

I trod off down the hallway, toward the elevator, readying myself for one of the most challenging parts of my new daily routine: checking up on the transformees in Room 268. The challenge—other than watching them turn into inhuman monsters—was that I was pretty much their only remaining link to normality, which was a terrible responsibility to have, given that I was lying to them and everyone else about my condition, and that I was pretty darn confident that I anything I did to help them would only make things worse.

But still, I’d put on my smile like always. I had a reputation to maintain: the smiling doctor with the glasses and the goofy bow-tie.

I kept my gaze low. I didn’t want to be seen.

I’m such a fraud.

My thoughts kept doubling back to the looks of horror on the faces of the people I’d failed at the precise moment they realized I’d failed them. The looks of Kreston and the other ghosts, running in terror from the demon Joe-Bob had become. The looks in Dr. Nesbitt and Dr. Mistwalker’s broken-souled eyes when I left them and Dr. Arbond in the operating theater with Merritt.

I was responsible for that suffering. I was probably going to Hell for that.

A memory flared of a promise I’d made. A promise I’d broken.

Oh God. Storn…

I hadn’t followed up with Merritt’s husband like I said I would. And now, I couldn’t! News about the transformees was to be kept under wraps, DAISHU’s orders.

Scratch that. I was definitely going to Hell. It was just like Sister Marcia told me back in Sessions School: I was a Hellbound soul; I broke everything that I touched.

I’d tried to live my life in such a way as to prove the priestess wrong, but—again—who was I kidding? I was barely a doctor; I was basically a psychiatrist pretending to be a neurosurgeon. Now, more than ever before, I didn’t feel like a man of medicine. I felt like a crypt-keeper; an undead sentinel; a watchman for a sea of ever-filling graves.

So, yeah: mentally, I was not in a good place.

As I turned around the corner of a hallway, I shivered.

What?

The temperature of the hallway had dropped off a cliff.

I looked up from the ground to find that the hallway had been transformed. Yes, it was still recognizably part of Ward E. It still had the checkered vinyl floor, all kitschy artworks framed on the walls, and seats and benches filled to the brim with sick patients, but all of that was buried beneath… well… Hell.

Scripture had a long tradition of detailing the torments of Hell. (By word count, the Elder Voices actually mentioned Hell more often than Paradise.) Lassedile tradition described Hell as a place of everlasting Night and impenetrable cold; a perfect void of perfect dark where the souls of the damned froze alive, trapped in agony and madness, to be tortured by demons—demons that they, themselves, would eventually become. Lakes of Coldfire. The Hallowed Beast’s devouring jaws. Bodies impaled on spikes of ice and stone, bound to them by chains of stinging guilt. Eldritch beasts from the chaos before creation. The list of torments were seemingly endless. It was said that Hell was so filled with the souls of the damned that they littered the ground like autumn leaves, forming great glaciers of corpses, transfixed in never-ending agony.

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And that’s what I saw. That was what lay in front of me, down the transfigured hall.

Terror sparked at the tip of my tail and ran all the way up to the top of my scalp.

Entire stretches of the hallway’s walls simply didn’t exist, and where they did, ice grew from the floors and ceiling in stalagmites and stalactites. The doors for the rooms in the parts of the hallway where the walls had disappeared stood like portals in the air. Beyond the doorways, the landscape stretched out in a barren waste of ice and snow and looming mountains. It was a bottomless winter, without any trace of warmth or light.

It was as if the hallway had become part of a ruined temple. Fluted marble columns rose both near and far. Arches and buttresses soared overhead, piercing through what should have been the upper floors of the Administration Building.

Darkness seeped into the hallway. The fluorescent lights up in the ceiling functioned perfectly—as bright as they should have been—yet, as soon as I looked away, it was as if the lights had dimmed. The ceiling lights cast light in a narrow cone that could barely pierce the distant shadows.

I stopped in my tracks.

It’s not real, I told myself. It’s not real.

But that was little assurance. A fell wind blew, whipping frozen shards. They stung as they passed me, though I saw no traces of cuts or wounds.

Andalon, what’s going on? What is this?

Suddenly, a nurse appeared right in front of me, seemingly out of nowhere. We collided.

“Watch your step!” she said.

Apologizing—muttering, bowing—I stepped off to the side, lost and confused. I picked a part of the wall that hadn’t vanished to lean against.

So, wyrmsight time.

Thickening it, I saw that the nurse had a consciousness aura.

So, she was real. She was alive. Keeping my magic vision thick, I looked out onto the hybrid scene all around me—half hospital, half icebound hellscape.

The bodies scattered over the ground were illusory. They had no auras, neither their own, nor the fungus’. That meant they were hyperphantasies—or, possibly, the corpses of ghosts that Andalon had failed to save.

I hoped they were the latter.

Meanwhile, figures made entirely of aura walked up and down the hall, seemingly indifferent to the hellscape around us.

No, there’s no ‘seemingly’ about it!

The aura figures were the people who were actually in the hallway. The rest was an illusion. Or, at least, I hoped it was.

The moist warmth feeling of my breaths trapped between my face and my mask suddenly became a lot less uncomfortable.

“Mr. Genneth?”

I turned around and looked down to see Andalon standing beside me. Shivering from the cold, she wrapped her arms around her torso.

“What is this?” I whispered.

“You got bad feels. Bad strong feelings.”

Am I doing this?

Andalon nodded. “I… I think so.”

That isn’t good enough!

She looked at me with worry. “Why not?”

Andalon, Hell—the fungus… it’s trying to conquer the world! The fungus can tap into transformees and wyrms and affect them. It can hijack our powers and attack the ghosts we’re supposed to protect! Look what it did to Frank, and Esmé, and Joe-Bob!

She shivered. “W-What does that mean?”

One of the aura-figures approached me, solidifying into a flesh and blood human being as it drew close—and a familiar human being, at that: Kevin the Nurse.

“Are you alright, Dr. Howle? You’ve been standing there for a while. People are…” lowering his voice, he nodded in concern, “well, people are starting to stare.”

“I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “I was just lost in thought.”

“Well, then, at least take a seat.” Kevin pointed at what I assumed was a chair leaning against the wall—only, to me, the chair was a crude stone construction, while ice encrusted the wall.

I sat down carefully—doubly so, minding my tail. But it was no use.

Yah!

The stone pressed against my rear. It was freezing cold, and the contact sent a jolt up through the base of my tail. I squeezed my hands, balling them into fists; laying them atop my thighs.

Kevin dissolved into pure consciousness-aura as he walked away, his physical form fading into the illusory scene.

“Mr. Genneth?”.

I looked off into the distance, down the corridor and muttered under my breath. “Maybe this is just me. Maybe it’s my stress or guilt literally manifesting before my eyes. If it is, I should be able to stop it, right?”

“Maybe?” Andalon said.

I dug my fingernails into my slacks. I didn’t need to explain to Andalon that I was upset, though.

She noticed it all by herself.

“But… what happens if you can’t?” she asked.

What if this is a retaliatory strike? What if Hell is trying to conquer me? Or take control of me?

“W-What?” Andalon stammered in terror. She shook her head. “No no no no no. Please, Mr. Genneth, don’t say that! That’s scary! That’s so scary!”

Please, Andalon, calm down. I rubbed my temples. You freaking out isn’t helping either of us.

I took a deep breath.

Beast’s teeth!

The cold felt real.

I exhaled. “I’m going to try to make it go away,” I whispered.

Andalon nodded repeatedly. She jittered around like a bobble-head doll.

Everything is normal, I told myself. Everything is fine. This is just another hyperphantasy. I can make it go away.

I stared into the hellscape.

C’mon now. Go away.

Closing my eyes, I repeated the command in my mind.

Go away. Go away. Go away.

“Mr. Genneth, look!”

Opening my eyes, I saw something worth smiling about.

A hole had opened in the hellscape. The hole was filled with the figurative light at the end of the tunnel, which, in this case, was the humdrum brightness of an ordinary hospital corridor. The hellscape receded toward the edges of my vision as reality won out over the illusion.

“Praise the Angel,” I muttered.

Good grief. It was just me. It was just me being stressed like usual.

I unclenched my hands.

I mean, Angel, if that really had been Hell and not just an unexpected attack of hyperphantasia, it had picked the worst possible time to strike.

I was already marked for Hell. I was turning into a monster. I’d let Frank and Esmé and Joe-Bob and who-knows-else turn into demons. I’d doomed three of my colleagues to die slow, horrific deaths in the operating theater, and I’d condemned Merritt Elbock to watch it all, front and center.

I couldn’t do anything right.

The real world shrank into a tiny disk that vanished into the blizzard-struck Night overhead.

“Mr. Genneth!” Andalon screeched in terror as the hellscape flooded back into view.

Fudge.