The inside of Oak’s mind was a dream of his own making.

Spook’s called these centers of memory and consciousness sanctuaries. He had tailored it after his homestead, with one major difference. In the place of the chicken coop, stood a large oak tree. Corpses of humans and animals hung from the branches and they swung around in the breeze.

The tree groaned in time with the swinging of its many prizes, and the leaves rustled softly.

Oak looked up at the false sky and froze. He had been inside Ma'aseh Merkavah for so many days already that looking at the sun was a strange experience. It felt like he could finally relax his shoulders, even though he knew the sun shining in his sanctuary was not real.

The wards guarding Oak’s mind overlapped with the false sky, manifesting fully when he called them forth. They were connected to one of the corpses hanging from the tree. His close encounter with the leviathan had destroyed the two other ghosts powering his wards. Other than that, his wards were operating just fine.

This did not surprise him. The hits he had been taking lately were not at fault for his current troubles. There was a reason the thought-plague had managed to slip inside his mind and it was related to the art of designing and constructing wards themselves.

It was exceedingly difficult, even borderline impossible, to construct a warding scheme for a human mind that could work just as effectively against trauma based attacks designed to rip your wards open and purge the mind inside, and very subtle attacks trying to slip memory constructs that did not directly harm you through those same wards.

Oak, like most theurgists he knew about, had optimized his wards with trauma based attacks in mind because if something cracked them and purged his mind, that was it. If, on the other hand, something like a thought-plague slipped inside his wards, he could deal with the issue if he was given a bit of time. He had prioritized survival, even though thought-plagues and memory traps were extremely annoying and sometimes difficult to deal with.

Thought-plagues were the bane of every army's existence and one of the many reasons a good spook was always in high demand. They could spread through the ranks like wildfire if they were not contained quickly, and pruning the plague from the affected warriors' minds could be a time-consuming affair.

Looking at his homestead made Oak nostalgic, but he gathered himself and got to work. The ghouls trying to claw their way through the cellar hatch were probably hard at work already, so he should not dally.

The ghouls certainly won’t.

He focused and examined his homestead with a discerning eye, trying to find any signs of Kushim’s memories. Something moved in the corner of his eye, and Oak snapped his gaze towards it, eager to seize a piece of the plague.

There was a very tall and well-built man leaning against the oak tree. He was wearing an apron and his hands were dripping with blood. The sound of a knife being sharpened rang in Oak’s sanctuary as the man moved a blade against a whetstone in calm, deliberate movements.

Shink, shink.

Oak flinched and looked away. He is not real; he is not real, he thought and started frantically looking for Kushim’s memories around the facsimile of the shed where he dried his firewood, firmly ignoring the figure leaning against the tree.

Not real. I am the master of my own mind. The captain of my thoughts.

He noticed a pair of sandals hanging from a nail on the wall. I don’t think I have ever owned a single pair of sandals, Oak thought and snatched them from the wall. A short examination followed, which showed his intuition had been correct. This was a part of the string of memories that made up the thought-plague currently hiding inside his mind.

The log cabin of his birth was on the other side of the yard, and Oak headed there next. He tried his best to be systematic about his investigation, examining every sequence of memory that made up his sanctuary.

Pruning a thought-plague from someone's mind was not usually dangerous, it was just time consuming. Here he had the advantage of pruning the plague from his own mind, so he was already intimately familiar with the sanctuary the plague was infecting, and he had built and designed the sanctuary with purpose in mind so it was not an unorganized mess of nonsense, which tended to be the case for people with no skill in the art of theurgy.

Finding nothing noteworthy on the ground outside his home, Oak headed inside the cabin. There, he immediately noticed a brown robe hanging from a clothes rack on the wall next to the door. Another piece of the puzzle. He picked it up and continued searching. After ten minutes of effort he finally found an inkwell on top of a shelf that did not belong in his sanctuary and with this clue in mind, he quickly found two quills, a reed pen and a scroll of vellum inside a scribes satchel.

The writing implements were hiding inside his tool cupboard and the satchel was behind his shrine to Ashmedai.

Oak gathered all the memory strings he found together and headed back outside. There, under the false sky of his sanctuary, he connected all the strings he had found to each other one at a time. The shape of a man slowly spun into being, and in no time at all, Kushim stood in front of him.

The man had black hair, a narrow nose and a tiny chin. He was dressed in the brown robe and the pair of sandals Oak had found. The satchel and the many pockets of Kushim’s robes hid away his writing equipment. Some of the man's pockets even had pockets of their own, which Oak found strange, but who was he to judge another man’s pockets?

A man can have a lot of faults, and having peculiar pockets compares favorably to most of them.

With the snap of Oak’s finger, a hangman's rope extended from a branch of the large oak tree in the middle of the yard and settled around the thought-plagues neck. Kushim looked at it with confusion evident in his eyes.

“Oh dear, what is this? Where am I? I really must get home immediately,” Kushim said, before Oak willed the rope to drag him to the tree and up in the air.

The memory construct went dormant and swung in the breeze with the rest of his constructs and ghosts. Oak could have destroyed it, but having a thought-plague in his arsenal did not seem like a bad idea. Kushim’s Bewilderment might just save his life one day. If the scribe who was a string could slip through his wards and be as disorienting as it had been, keeping the template could prove very useful.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

With careful study, he might be able to create other strings just like it from spare ghosts, if he ever had any spare ghosts, that is. It would be nice to have some thought-plagues ready for deployment.

Now that the slippery string of memories was under control and safely in storage, Oak was ready to leave his sanctuary behind. He gave one last look at the tree. There was no sign of the man with bloody hands. The yard did not ring in the laughter that followed in his wake.

I am free of him.

The thought felt more like a prayer than a truth, and Oak’s faith hung by a thread over an endless chasm. Conviction alone felt like a hollow shield, so he turned to action. It was time to leave the basement and show the ghouls outside the cellar what was what.

***

The cellar hatch slammed open, sending two ghouls flying. Oak ran up the stairs, sword in hand, and decapitated a surprised-looking ghoul standing next to the hatch, black eyes wide and mouth open.

The ghoul's head had not even hit the floor when something slammed into his back and he stumbled as long fangs sank into his right shoulder. Cursing up a storm, Oak jumped backwards and slammed himself and the ghoul on his back against the stonewall of the house. Something cracked, and the ghoul let out a wail of pain.

He reached over his shoulder with his left hand and grabbed a hold of the monster's neck. With furious strength, Oak ripped the ghoul off of his back and slammed it head first into the floor. A quick stomp stopped the ghoul's floundering, and Oak stepped over the broken corpse.

Geezer poked his head out from the cellar, looked around and decided Oak was perfectly capable of dealing with this by himself. The dog’s head vanished back into the darkness.

The last two ghouls left had gotten back on their feet and they were staring at him like men dying of hunger stared at a roasted pig.

“Well, come on then, you wastes of flesh,” Oak said with a smile on his face. “I want to paint these walls with your innards.”

The ghouls charged forward, and Oak’s sword blurred.

***

Hunger was really bothering Oak. After the fight with the ghouls had ended, and he and Geezer had slipped away, he began to feel the cost of all that running and fighting acutely. Tiredly, he checked his progress.

Status.

Infernal engine

Current status:

* Souls: 46

* Fuel: 8

* Attunement in progress

Branches

Boons

Branch of Flauros

Pyromancy: grants an intuitive understanding of fire and the basic ability to summon it.

Branch of Amdusias

Ears of Amdusias: grants sharp hearing and the basic ability to see one's environment through sound.

Branch of Buer

Demonic Constitution: grants slightly faster healing from injury, lessens fatigue and increases the rate of recovery from physical activity.

Theurgy

Current status:

* Ghosts: 6

Wards

Ghosts attached: 1

Trauma weapons

Kaarina’s Horror

Thought-plagues

Kushim’s Bewilderment

Scouts

Raven

Miscellaneous ghosts

Sparrow

Cat

The fuel number had ticked up again, which pleased him greatly. It was a good thing ghouls were quite dumb, impatient and easily distracted. If the entire pack had been waiting for them over the cellar hatch, things might have ended badly. His hands trembled, and his stomach felt like a bottomless pit, desperate for any nourishment that could fill it.

Sadly, food was not easy to find in the City of God, unless you were partial to ghoul meat, which Oak definitely was not. Geezer had once again been more than happy to fill his belly, but Oak was still holding onto hope. It was not like there was any guarantee he could even eat the flesh of a ghoul and not poison himself. He was not a hellhound.

Oak had not gotten lost during their mad flight away from the ghouls, so they continued to traverse the streets and alleys of Ma'aseh Merkavah, slowly but surely making their way towards the obelisk on the western corner of the city center.

Houses, apartments, parks, and squares blurred together as they marched in silence through gloom and fog. The combination of constant danger, boredom and hunger was picking Oak apart bit by bit. He was so tired he almost walked past it.

Like a mirage in the desert heat, a barracks rose from the fog on Oak’s right. He stared at it and blinked stupidly, gazing at it with uncomprehending eyes.

“Geezer, is that a barracks or am I dreaming?” Oak asked and rubbed his eyes. Hope surged inside him, but he squashed it down. There was no guarantee the place had the supplies he needed or that those supplies would be in good condition.

With a slightly shaking hand, Oak opened the wooden gate and stepped under the arch. Inside the walls was a training ground and a large barracks building where the garrison calling this place home had once slept before the Doom. It was much like all the barracks in any castle or town Oak had ever seen. A big, blocky rectangle with a gable roof and a color scheme that induced depression. The designers of this particular rectangle had decided that the color of mud was a perfect choice for a building meant for soldiers.

In Oak’s experience, mud was a central part of all campaigns, so the choice was warranted.

They walked across the training grounds and headed straight for the front door of the barracks. Oak could barely contain his excitement. If he was lucky, the barracks would have a supply storage. There was no telling what they might find here. I might even find field rations, he thought, and giggled silently into his beard.

Geezer looked at him and huffed in annoyance. The hound regarded him with an expression that seemed to convey a deep sense of disappointment with his owner's current levity. They were, after all, in deep shit, with no end in sight. Oak ignored his dog’s opinion, on account of the fact that Geezer felt a sense of impending doom on most days of the week, and it was better to live in hope than wallow in despair.

One of them had to be an optimist, and considering his company, the job landed on Oak’s lap.

It took a bit of pulling, but eventually the door of the barracks opened with a creak and, after a brief period of intense listening to make sure the noise had not awakened another monster, Oak and Geezer stepped into the darkness.