In the void again.

The same fear began to creep up as some part of me recognized the situation… but an equal part of me was irritated. Is this big fuck-all evil cloud going to kill me or what? Shit, or get off the pot, man.

I turned in a slow circle, realizing I was standing on a disc floating in space. At first, I thought it was black, but upon crouching down and getting a closer look, I discovered it was reflective.

I looked like shit.

I’m a pretty harsh judge of my own looks but even by my self-deprecating standards, I looked haggard. My eyes were sunken and the bags under my eyes were almost bruised looking. My skin (that wasn’t black as ink) was pale and thin-looking, almost translucent. You could see the veins in my face. My normally untamed and poofy hair was plastered to my scalp and neck with sweat and grease, a few strands falling in my vision.

I stood with some effort, feeling sore. I spotted the growing clouds of evil blackness billowing some distance out, but for some reason couldn’t muster the energy to care. I was… just tired of being afraid.

Afraid of my father. Afraid of losing my friends. Fear of losing my life. Fear of a fate worse than death. Afraid for my new friends. Afraid for my brother.

I remembered feeling this way before. It was like emotional burnout… or perhaps apathy? Can you injure your emotions from overuse like pulling a muscle? Have I reached my capacity for fear and now I’m just left with a sense of inevitability?

The clouds were getting closer, and I could feel their weight. No, weight was the wrong word. It was like the clouds had their own gravity, but instead of pulling things in, it began to wear you down spiritually. Like the edge of a sandstorm, rasping away at your soul one small increment at a time.

And it wasn’t even here yet.

I had a vague sense of familiarity with this situation. I could just barely remember that the big, star-sized cloud bank had approached me before… but the details were hazy. I remember the terror. That stood out. But what happened after the terror? Obviously, I survived.

Fuck it. Let’s wait for the thing.

I slowly lowered myself to sit on the disk with a groan, feeling a pain in my side I couldn’t explain. Sweat gathered on my face as I waited for the billowing darkness to arrive.

It took its fucking time. You’d think something as big as a star with the aura of a sandblaster would be able to cover more ground. Over the next few minutes, I studied the blacker-than-black clouds, only able to tell their shape as they blotted out the stars around them. As it approached, the grating feeling increased from uncomfortable to nigh-unbearable. Yet I didn’t flee. Where could I flee to? I was on this fucking disk.

I continued to inwardly grouse about the slow progress and the incredible discomfort of what I could call my soul. But, seemingly between one blink and the next, everything in front of me, all the stars and vast expanse of space disappeared and the discomforting aura felt like a dozen sledgehammers hitting my psyche all at once.

It seemed to go on forever, but aside from the pain-that-wasn’t-quite-pain, I didn’t seem to take any damage. After a subjective eternity, I started to get used to the sensation enough to look up at the blackness.

I looked from side to side and saw that the thing wasn’t even that close. It’s hard to judge distances with no landmarks, but I’d guess the vast blackness wasn’t within ten thousand miles. But I guess it’s all relative, right? To something star-sized, ten thousand miles is a trip to the fridge. (But then again, I don’t even know how to judge ten thousand miles in a glance. For all I know it could be billions.)

I had slumped over on my side when the pressure on my spirit had become unbearable, so I slowly (with many grunts and groans) pushed myself up to a sitting position again. I looked up at the seemingly endless black and waited.

...and waited.

“Well?!” I yelled. “I haven’t got all day!”

Considering where I was, I may be having a psychotic break. I imagined Alice and Ida forcing me to sit in a chair as I yelled at Bogo, thinking the poor not-dog was some evil space cloud. I hoped the little guy was safe.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Suddenly I could see something within the black. The old fear returned by degrees as a… protrusion of cloud-stuff started forming in the vast expanse of black. I don’t know how I could see it, as there still wasn’t any light. I had changed my eyes to see in the dark, but they didn’t work in complete darkness. They still had retinas, they still needed light. How the fuck was I seeing this?

The new shape was like a tendril slowly lengthening, approaching me at a sedate pace. I was suddenly reminded of the water tentacle from The Abyss. This thing approaching me gave me a similar vibe, though more sinister as it was made out of whatever cosmic blackness was in front of me and not salt water.

As it approached, I suddenly realized that the sedate pace it was moving at was actually quite fast, crossing many miles every second. Shouldn’t there be a sonic boom? Or is there air? How am I breathing? I—

My ruminations were interrupted by the arrival of the space cloud tentacle. It stopped just short of my disk and just kinda floated there. In the distance, it had looked quite small, but up close it was easily bigger than an aircraft hanger in width. I gaped up at it for a while before once again growing impatient. Was I supposed to do something?

While I didn’t feel I was in any danger from the aura this thing was giving off, it was incredibly uncomfortable (though, again, not quite painful). I wanted whatever this was to get over with ASAP. So I struggled to my feet and walked a couple of paces to the edge of the disk.

This seemed to be what the space cloud wanted, as the tentacle underwent a change. The tip of it irised open, but less a mechanical function and more… fleshy. What I am now calling the orifice slowly opened, and the pressure I was under suddenly doubled, hitting me in the chest like a fire hose. It didn’t have any actual, physical force, but I still stumbled back and fell on my ass as my soul was suddenly assaulted by a military-grade rock polisher.

It was all I could do to maintain my sanity and force myself to look toward the opening. I could see a figure in there, alien in shape but—unbelievably, somehow familiar. It reached toward me with something and—

* * *

A wet something was poking my face. Something vaguely dog breathy. I groaned and tried to roll away, but stopped as a lance of pain went up my side.

“Boof!”

“Hey boy,” I said without opening my eyes.

“Boof!”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “Or I hope I will be. Are the girls around?”

“Boof,” Bogo said, followed quickly by his nails scratching across the floor. I assume he left to find the ladies.

I lay on what felt like a couch. I cracked open my eyes to see my chest and abdomen covered in layers of foul-smelling gauze. I frowned and gingerly touched my side, wincing with the pain that resulted. I smelled the finger that had touched the bandage and wrinkled my nose. It smelled infected. Or… rotting, might be a better word.

I blinked my eyes a few times to get some moisture in them and studied the room. It appeared to be… a house? There was an entertainment center, a sliding glass door, and what looked like a kitchen through the other door that I could see. The place was decorated in wood accents and off-white paint, with stained hardwood floors. I tried to sit up to get a better look around the room but the pain in my side stopped me.

A minute later Alice came from somewhere behind me, kneeling next to me. “How are you doing?” She asked as she put the back of her hand on my forehead.

“Like I was stabbed by a demon truck,” I replied. “I don’t seem to be able to move much. What happened to that healing trick you can do? Not to sound ungrateful, mind you.”

She winced. “That spell requires a specific reagent that I only could only salvage a little of,” she said and held up her purse. I hadn’t noticed this morning (or yesterday?), but there was a bullet hole through the side that exited the corner. She reached in and pulled out a broken vial.

“Sap from the bodhi, ash from an ash tree from the isle of Tír na nÓg, and honey created by bees with access to a thousand unique flower species,” Alice listed.

I tried to process what she said. “Tír na nÓg’s real?” I asked.

She smiled and nodded. “I did what I could with what little I had left, but I only had enough to clear your system of whatever that spike was pumping into you. But I couldn’t get all of it, and we’ve cleared out several Walgreens and CVSs in a twenty-mile radius of their gauze. Ida’s out getting more.”

If I could lay my head back further, I would have done so now for dramatic effect. “Fuck,” I said after a beat. “What’s the prognosis?”

“Well, there’s good news and bad news,” Alice said as she put her purse on the ground and pulled out her phone. “The good news is that you are recovering on your own. Did you beef up your immune system?”

“Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” I said while meeting her eyes. She raised an eyebrow at me. “But yes,” I continued. “I kinda went on a few forums and floated an idea about how, if one could change their bodies, how they would make them better. I picked from the guys that sourced their ideas from medical texts.”

“Colm,” Alice said disapprovingly.

“I know, but I was safe, and I really did do a lot of research,” I said sheepishly. “But you’ve now had to put me back together twice. I needed—no, I need to be able to recover quicker.” I gestured at my bandages.

She gave me a worried look before relenting and began tapping on her phone. “What’s the bad news?” I prompted.

Alice didn’t answer but showed me her phone. On it was a picture of my side, with the gruesome wound. I began to ask what she was showing me, but then I saw it. Under the blood, the edges of the skin and the organs within the wound were the same shade of black as my hands.

“Ah,” I said.