You lift his body up, arm over your shoulder. You don’t quite understand why you do this, the right thing to do?

The two of you begin walking, you don’t know where you are, but you will get home.

You know it.

“I’m going to take us back to the Festival of the Sun.” You say to him with a soft voice.

He lifts a shaking hand, pointing in a seemingly arbitrary direction. “That way.” His voice is rasping and sickly, his body shaking against you.

You raise your unoccupied hand to the horizon without thinking.

“No!” the fitful man suddenly shouts, his body then racked by dry coughing. “Do not flicker. My body cannot handle it in my current state. Manifesting all of my Memory Constructs sapped what little Allegory I had left.”

“How long will it take to get back there? How much time do you have?” You ask plodding one step after the next, Sero’s body dead weight upon your side.

He gets a foot under himself. A desperate, anxious, scared gesture. “I need… Food, Allegory, anything… Travelspace—” The man in your arms suddenly coughs violently. It is wet, blood and spittle flying from his mouth onto the pristine floor. “It will kill me! I have no more!”

Your eyes widen, the predicament setting in.

You don’t have enough time to take him back to the Festival.

“Can you make a Bind Point, like you did before?” You set him down on the ground, his knees folded below him. Your voice wavers slightly, unsure of the best course of action.

“I need Allegory–” Another cough, blood, and spit fly like insects of the swarm. “I need more to make a Bind Point… It’s killing me! How could you?!”

His manner is deteriorating, his eyes wild from either pain or fear, possibly both. He looks around frantically, his gaze wide and terrified. His previously silent and nearly non-existent breathing suddenly fast and primally loud.

You dislodge yourself, searching for possible solutions. You feel strangely calm past your worry for this man in this unfamiliar world.

A solution presents itself: Leave him here, find what Sero needs to not die, fly back, and save him.

“Uh, Sero,” You begin, setting him down and looking around at the barren, white world surrounding you, “I’m going to go and get you, you said food? Right? Why do you need food? This isn’t how starving works is it?”

“I need food! I can replenish my Allegory with it– Go!” He yells, throat raw. He brandishes a hand from the ground like a duster to remove you. Suddenly, you feel as if a strong wind, warm and rushing, blisters over you. It pushes you away slightly as you say urgently, “How do I leave?!”

“Stable Bind Point… that way!” He points and promptly collapses on the ground with a thud. You look back at the prone man groaning on the ground as you turn and run.

“Why do you turn against me, my friend–?” You hear from him, diminishing to silence in the emptiness of Travelspace, filled with the slap of your feet on the ground.

You leap, activating both Tokens automatically, instinctually lifting your feet and legs to be in front of yourself as that strange mixture of First Tensor and Rising Star envelops your horizontal form.

You blast out over the barrenness, the smooth, white landscape flying behind you as you leave Sero behind. Your swiftness carries you across featureless terrain, such immense stretches of unvarying, unbroken land! No wind passes over your ears, no sky to familiarly roar.

Suddenly, without thinking, you deactivate Rising Star, hand clenching before you. The great, terrible chasm appears beneath you again, lasting for its horrible instant. You fall over the gap as it seals, the quiet flicker whispering to you the outcome of failure.

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

You flicker more, flashing into Rising Star in between for more speed. You don’t know how long it takes, too long perhaps, you don’t know. But finally, after an agonizing flight of unfamiliar calm and familiar anxiety, you spot an irregularity.

You touch down smoothly at a run, eyes locked upon a spot of color that hovers above the snowy ground. Below the Bind Point, whose size is significantly larger than the ones Sero and Tyrr’olni’nel’mul had summoned, ripples appear to rise from below it and travel outward. Like ripples on the surface of a still pool, they run from the floating orb of color that shifts every instant, people from a fire.

You try to ignore them as they stab at your feet as you cross to the Bind Point, your hand closing on the small orb of light.

***

Heat, unbearable, searing heat assaults you from all sides. Everything is on fire! Your skin, eyes, mouth, body. Everything burns! You scream as the pain burrows itself into you, searing your very being. Your mind screams to be away, and you fall upward. The light illuminates this place without sight, this place of burning pain. It illuminates nothing but the pale, innumerable contours of a mass of steam. Everywhere you turn as you ascend, steam is ever present, rising and dancing with your seared, golden form.

The temperature that felt unbearable slowly became calmer, drifting from burning to very warm. The steam around you slowly begins to dwindle, vapors condensing in the lower heat into infinite, warm raindrops that fall against your ascension. You push yourself upward, your golden chest heaving as your tender skin is soothed by the rain. Your light illuminates dark clouds ahead, lukewarm masses of steam rain that churn and swirl on their jet currents.

You pass through them at speed, rushing upward from whatever place this is. The clouds break into a void. Dim light, almost imperceptible, streams around you, filling this empty abyss with some semblance of reality. The clouds below, black as pitch, roil as the floor to an infinite room of blackness around you. Overhead, so far away, is a net of something, twisting and turning around the source of light like a poorly made net. The net casts shafts of dimly crimson and white light from above, creating an unearthly illusion, a beautifully otherworldly space.

You rise faster, your golden form glowing brighter as you accelerate, casting out scintillating rays of gold. The net above grows too slowly, how far away! You activate First Tensor, golden form shifting shade to a strange, purple-grey that shines like boiling water. Your form bubbles, rumbling with purple light wreathed in luminescent grey, masses that boil off and fade in the growing, dim light. Your speed increases.

“Hang in there Sero…” Your voice is distorted, rippling, and rumbling; alien.

As you draw nearer and nearer to the net, you notice something. It looks like roots.

You are under the underworld.

The thought stabs itself into you just before you pass them. You blast through the web of roots, rocketing upward toward the cloud layer. It comes up fast, nearing ever closer. Your tail extends downward from the abyss that held you, weaving through the titanic roots of the Trees.

Breaking through the wet barrier that is the cloud layer, you rise in force into a crimson night. Bright and shining, hanging everpresent above an empty world, Eirii fills the world alone with her blood-red light from the heavens.

Your eyes widen, the implications of the moons’ positions revealing themselves to you as you blast southward, toward the Festival of The Sun. Singly Eirii says it is going to be a bloody night.

The air rushes, finally a familiar feeling. You carefully relish in the assaulting sky, the assaulting, ruby sky.

You pass Tree after Tree, guided by blind adrenalin and a vague idea of what the Festival’s Tree looks like. You search each tree at a distance, never sparing a moment too long on each Tree, your flight appearing to rebound off each Tree like a ball thrown against a wall.

Your aberrant search deems itself fruitful, as you suddenly spot the oddly ball-like canopy of the Tree that holds the Festival. You rocket toward it, shooting through the outer net of leaves with force. You weave your way through the surprised, dwindling crowds searching every empty platter for anything edible.

Releasing Rising Star and First Tensor, you gather fruit, mushrooms, and even a skewer of charred meat into your surprisingly grey and purple-skinned arms. Your entire left side appears to be burned, almost, sporting your flight’s aberrant coloring in fading blotches and slashes across your skin. They seem to melt, almost, fading at a rapid rate. So you deem them unimportant. You don’t feel any different, so nothing is wrong!

You shove one last bell-shaped fruit whose blue and yellow body is almost the size of your fist into your teeth for safekeeping before pulling your haul up close to you.

You spin, only to come face to face with a glowing orange sphere floating above a flaming hand, your nose mere inches from the burning orb.

You freeze, unable to think clearly.

“Go, my child. Save the Forerunner.” L’Oos’s almost motherly voice speaks, breaking the ochre spell.

“...Why do you help me? Why do you help Sero?” You ask, the fruit dropping from your mouth as your patron’s voice comes back to you.

“Nova, honor our agreement, we must catch him.” He had said.

“Kill him.” It felt like now, for some inexplicable reason.

“Tyrr’olni’nel’mul is a wild card, his reckless Aarkiel ambitions and my own plans do not match up. He moves now, you do not have much time, Nova.” L’Oos says calmly. “Go, the outsider is of more use to us alive than dead.”