'There's nothing to be done.' Terrible phrase, that, and one that fails to encapsulate all the little details of horror it brings. Doctors wave that phrase around to clean themselves of any responsibility. It's not that they can't solve the problem, it's not a personal failure, it's something impossible. Must make it easier to sleep at night, being able to brush off the idea of someone's impending death with a quick, cookie-cutter phrase. To others, though, it makes sleep so much worse... when it's something attainable at all. Tossing and turning on rumpled bedding, an elderly man jerks sharply from side to side, his eyes frantically sweeping back and forth underneath his eyelids, reliving some unpleasant moment. The damned phrase echoed in his dreams, along with images of hospitals, of treatments, of a small, feminine figure lying in bed with too many tubes hooked up to too many machines. Sweat ran rivulets down the old man's face, his too-slim chest heaving with the gasping, shuddering draw of breath. He abruptly sat up, shouting a reverberating "NO!" into the darkness of the night, eyes jolting open as an arm outstretched before him, grasping at an illusion, a remnant of his dream. 

Long moments passed as he slowly came to his senses, aided by the banging of a neighbor in the next apartment protesting at the noise in the wee hours of the early morning. Hands reached up toward his face, and too-thin, bony fingers swept across his features, wiping at his eyes. It was merely sweat from the night, of course. Even here, in the privacy of his own home, he wouldn't admit to tears. "Lovely to see you, Amanda, as always." A rasping, feeble voice called out conversationally to the empty room, with a sense of familiarity. "Though, I do wish you'd come and visit in the pleasant dreams, once in a while. Yes, yes. We both know I don't have pleasant dreams anymore. But I'm sure you could manage one if you tried." A sharp clack resounded as a lamp was turned on atop the nearby nightstand, and his gaze lingered on a photo of a young woman, looking to be in her early twenties. Short blonde hair, captivating blue eyes, fair skin. The way he preferred to remember her: at her best, before the treatments made her lose her hair. Cancer is a terrible thing, only made so much worse when it was detected far too late. 

Time was supposed to heal all wounds, or at least blunt them. That's what all the do-gooders liked to parrot at him, their chicken-noodle-soup for his bitter, angry soul. How could they understand that each and every day he felt that pain as fresh as the day it first happened. The world felt so much dimmer without her light to shine in it. His heart felt so much emptier now that he alone had to fill it. They tried to tell him it wasn't healthy, to dwell. To keep talking to her as he always tried to do, to create the smallest comfort for himself in imagining she was there beside him, watching over him. To hell with healthy, then! He preferred the idea of her over trying to conform to whatever kind of health they wanted for him! 

Malcom Donald was an exceptional example of a crotchety old bastard. He barely managed to scoot himself around the house with a heavy stoop to his back, hunched forward and half propped up by a cane, stumbling along in a Quasimodo-like posture. His limbs were too thin and boney, from a lack of sleep, insufficient eating, and poor health combined. His pale skin was almost stretched taut over his frame, and was growing increasingly vampire-like as he spent less and less time venturing out of his home, keeping the curtains drawn to avoid having to see passerby. After all: he hated people. All of them, as a whole, infuriated him. They didn't even have the decency to keep their happiness isolated to themselves! Every time he went out, everyone was so damn happy all the time! What was there to be happy about? That, and they always gave him strange looks whenever he had something to say to Amanda. He wasn't just talking to himself! They just couldn't hear the other half of the conversation. 

Heaving himself out of bed with one hand on the nightstand and the other trying to steady his cane underneath him, Malcom started to hoist himself into a standing posture. He took several long breaths and tried to fight off the sense of light-headedness that came with his rise, eventually starting a slow shuffle toward the bathroom. Trying to clear his throat only devolved into an awful fit of coughing, spitting into the sink unceremoniously as he rattled through the medicine cabinet, going for his pill case. Popping open the last of the sections and pouring the entire mix into his mouth like candy, he stared forward at his tired reflection, locking eyes with his own doppelganger on the other side of the glass. "It's been too long, Amanda. I can feel it. Every day, down in my bones, the tiredness leaves a little more behind. It'll be soon, I bet. We'll see each other again." A small smile formed in the mirror, flitting across his expression, the idea the only thing that could manage to bring it to his face. "We'll dance, like we used to. I can't wait to see what you'll look like dancing again, dear. I can barely remember." 

The very idea had him feeling light on his feet, as if he could dance right here on the spot, borderline-crippled back and all. No, in fact... it wasn't just his feet. Everything felt light. Dreamy. Like he was about to fall back asleep. Preposterous, he just woke up. Shaking his head, he forced his eyes open wider, as if that would alleviate his tiredness, and started toward the kitchen. "I'll cook for you, still, though. All those times I cooked for you were pure pleasure compared to cooking for just myself. I could care less what I eat, but I always cooked the best when it was for you. Have to touch up reading the recipe book, though... wouldn't want to forget..." His voice trailed off into mumbling, then eventually silence, his train of thought fragmented and struggling. 

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Malcom's thought process was rather jarringly interrupted by the repeated rapping against his apartment door. "Fuck off!" He yelled at the door with an immediate frown. These people, can't they just leave him alone? It quickly became clear that whoever was making themselves known wasn't taking refusal for an answer, the rapping knock easing into a wall-rattling pounding of a fist demanding attention. Continuing to swear under his breath at the idiocy of whoever was bothering him, he eventually shuffled to the door and cracked it open, peering through a narrow crack into the hallway. "What?" Malcom demanded, eyeing the balding, rotund middle-aged fellow standing in the hallway, wearing their pajamas. One of the neighbors he didn't bother to remember the name of, even if he still recognized the face. "It's every morning you're shouting, waking up my kids! It's three in the morning! Three!" 

Malcom rolled his eyes, growling under his breath, "Your screaming gremlins kept me up late enough times when they were still on the tit, so I don't give a shit if they get woke up a few times. Now piss off." He made a move to shut the door again, but the livid man shoved his arm in the open gap and shouldered the door. He was shouting something in response, but the words didn't seem to register with his ears. Malcom had jumped backward from the sudden lunge, and though the neighbor had never so much as touched him, he lost his balance, feeling his center of mass tipping too far back, arms splaying outward to try and catch on something to steady himself. The angry look in the neighbor's eyes turned to surprise, belatedly half-reaching toward Malcom as he fell toward a bookshelf. The frail arms caught against the frame of it, doing little besides rattling it in place. It wobbled, then a sharp crack sounded out as one of the lower boards on the overburdened bookcase broke from the jolt. The entire frame and its contents tipped forward, looming over the sprawled elderly man on the floor. Thump. And everything was black. 

Nothingness. On the one hand, a blessing. All the little aches and pains that Malcom had lived with for so long that they had become an intrinsic part of his day were gone. On the other hand, there was no one waiting for him in the emptiness. That just... cannot be right. She's going to meet me. Amanda will be there, waiting for me, of course. It's the only way things are meant to wind up. After all, there's still... something going on. Malcom had his thoughts, here in the nothing. Does that mean that she's here, too, somewhere he can't sense yet? Wait. What's this? A light? He always thought it to be cliché, the idea that at the end of it all there would be a light at the end of the tunnel. A gentle blue hue, like a clear sky on a summer day. Is this the place in-between? Maybe he was just too impatient, and he was being whisked away to his pearly gates. These things took time, he supposed, though he could hardly be blamed for wanting to see his Amanda again as soon as possible. 

The light was swelling, growing brighter now, but it no longer looked like an opening at the end of a tunnel. Well, no, that's not true. There definitely was a tunnel, and the light was at the end of it, but at the wrong end of it. A simple blue sphere was emitting the light, supported by a pedestal about three feet tall and nearly as wide around. The sphere was merely about an inch in diameter, seemingly out-of-place on the huge stone pedestal that supported it. And why was it giving off so much light? It was growing brighter and brighter, until Malcom felt it was the only thing in his vision, like it was engulfing everything he could observe. 'Who could imagine the passage to Heaven could be so simple and underwhelming?' He mused to himself, the sense of tension rising, expecting to find something on the other side once his vision wasn't dominated by the blue glow. 

When the intense light faded, he was still in the same place. A semicircle of a dome creating a chamber twenty-feet across, the pedestal in the middle, and the marble-like orb perched precisely in the middle of that. The only new addition was a blue-tinged window that popped itself up in front of his field of vision. 

Soul Integration successful.

Dungeon core has been stabilized.

Please enter the dungeon's name.

Malcom didn't have any idea what any of this was supposed to mean, but he latched on to one important keyword. Soul. This blue marble had taken his soul? Become his soul? His soul had become the marble? It wasn't clear exactly which was the case, but they all led in mostly the same direction. One he was struggling to avoid thinking about. 'Amanda... what have I gotten dragged into? And where are you?' The thought echoed in his head. Did he even have a head? Was this sphere his head now? It didn't matter. 'She isn't here. Where is she? She isn't here. Where is she? SHE ISN'T HERE. WHERE. IS. SHE?' He could feel that he was spiraling down into an unhealthy place. The only thing that he had clung to for so, so long was the fact that at the end of it, Amanda would be there. Waiting for him. To have his hopes raised so far, only to find them lacking, was almost as if he was losing his wife all over again. No, no. He wasn't losing her again. He simply hadn't found her yet. All he had to do was start looking.