I woke up with a headache. Again. I grimaced, massaging my head. This was becoming a fucking habit again, and I wasn’t excited about it. I sat up with a groan, looking around…and noticed I could see. Which was objectively better than before I’d passed out, when my eyeballs had exploded in my skull from electrocution. On second thought, maybe just this once I was ok with falling unconscious.
Under other circumstances I’d have worried about getting attacked, but with Bernadette watching from the sidelines, not to mention the other examiners, plus Archie overhead, I was safe as houses passed out on top of that mountain.
No, my main concern now was where the hell I WAS. I looked around, spotting my companion perched in the rafters, watching me calmly. He let out a trilling cry, and I frowned at him. “Don’t be sarcastic. I won a huge competition. I’m entitled to a brief rest.” Another trill. “You could NOT have done better. How would you even walk up a thousand step flight of stairs? You’re a bird. What, are you going to hop up one step at a time?”
A muffled giggle caught my attention, and I turned to find Bella sitting next to the bed, covering her mouth. “Sorry master. Didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“It’s fine,” I sighed. “He’s just being difficult to distract me. He could tell I was freaking out a bit.”
Archie and I were bonded. Maybe not the same way as me and Callie, but bonded all the same. My phoenix could tell when I was upset, at the very least. It was impressive he knew me well enough to know how to take my mind off things, but I did appreciate it.
I didn’t see anyone else around, so I reached into my ring and withdrew the token I hadn’t previously been able to look at much. The Torment Token was made of a shiny black material that I had initially mistaken for obsidian. On closer inspection, it didn’t feel heavy enough to be volcanic glass, being nearly weightless, and besides that, the shine was wrong.
In fact, I had never seen anything exactly like it. It felt kind of like liquid darkness, but as a solid. The longer I looked at it, the further my gaze was pulled in. Rather than reflections or glints of light, it seemed like I was looking at almost the opposite. The shine seemed to be slight glints of light managing to escape from the dark as it swallowed most of the light around it. It was a deeply unsettling thing to look at, but I couldn’t avert my gaze, because I could see…something.
The closer I looked, the clearer it became. Engravings, stories told in the absence of light, negative space in a way I’d never seen before. The story of a girl, raised by a cruel and distant father, who only knew how to communicate with pain. A girl whose entire existence was suffering from the day she was born, and who used her suffering as a way to understand others, to find common ground.
Felicity, the Lady of Lamentations, because pain and sorrow were her only companions, and the lenses through which she viewed the world. I saw her grow in power, making friends by taking their pain, making enemies and inflicting hers upon them.
If it were any other medium, any other story, I’d suspect her of manipulating me. With this though…it was so clinical, so detached. This was like math, the recounting of a life in the cold and brutal terms of emotionless fact. There was no bias, no attempt to reach out…at first. But the deeper I looked, the more I saw.
Pain. This story was written in emotional pain, in the absence of hope. And I could feel it more and more as I watched. Despite the emotions beginning to seep in, I could still see the truth of it. This was how she related to others, there was no deception, she didn’t do that.
Which made it worse. I felt the tears trailing down my cheeks as I resonated with her loneliness, with her solitude and despair.
Except she wasn’t despairing. Felicity, so ironically named, because the same thing had happened to her that had happened to my distant adopted cousin. Her only means of communication was pain, giving or receiving it, and slowly, she became numb, became cold. She wore away at her humanity in the same way OUR Felicity had, except she did it to herself.
The story continued, the girl left home, abandoning her father. She didn’t run from him, simply turned her back on him, and in the singular act of kindness he ever showed her, he didn’t follow. She travelled and learned, she built her legend. Sometimes as a saint, sometimes as a monster, and eventually as a goddess. During this time, her father died, but she did not mourn him, simply accepted the pain of his passing as a gift, the one time she was able to truly connect.
When she herself died, she’d thought it would be peaceful. It wasn’t. Nothingness was its own pain. The pain of non existence, and then- the connection ended. I stared down at my empty hands through tear blurred eyes, and looked up to find Callie smiling sadly down at me.
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“What are we going to do with you?” she asked in fond exasperation. “Just picking up random god artifacts and having emotional exchanges with them. The Domain of a god isn’t something you’re ready to interact with. Didn’t you give me a whole speech about this?” She bopped me on the head with the token. “Especially using your Eye of Revelation.”
I shook my head, and then realized the mask was warm against my face. I cursed, putting the token away. “Wasn’t that. I think the connection to her dad made the mask…reactive. The two items formed a connection for a minute and I got swept up. Thanks for stepping in. I don’t think that would have killed me or anything, but I doubt I’d have enjoyed going any deeper. I learned a lot that I’m…not sure what to do with. Like you said, I did give a speech. Humanizing gods gets you killed.”
Seeing the Lady of Lamentation’s tragic backstory HAD made me feel bad for her, but it had also scared me. I wasn’t sure if the conclusions I’d drawn were right. The similarities to Felicity (my cousin) might have been my own imagination, but a goddess who was that kind of brutal, mechanical, person…that shouldn’t even be possible Zeke said that kind of process precluded being able to go very far down a Path. So it might be something different.
Whatever the case, it had given me insight, for good or ill. I smiled up at Callie’s shadowy form. “So you can just manifest on my side whenever huh?”
“Afraid of a visit from your wife?” she asked archly, though I could see a playful glint in her eyes. “Maybe I should knock first.” At my eyeroll, she just chuckled and turned to look at my shocked apprentice. “It’s nice to meet you Bella. My idiot husband has been too busy passing out all over the place to introduce us. Speaking of which, what the hell S-Mephistopheles? I thought you were past that phase.”
“Don’t get me started,” I groaned. “I’m working on it, but in this case I don’t think it was a bad thing. Archie had to regrow my eyes, an experience I’m happy to have skipped.”
She grimaced. “I can understand that. Anyway, try not to fry your brain before I see you again. I’ve gotten surprisingly attached over the course of our short marriage. I’d hate to have to retrain you if you blast your mind apart and lose all your memories.”
I put a hand to my chest, putting on a touched voice. “Oh, honey. You say the sweetest things. But don’t worry, chances are good I’d just die.” She laughed, leaned up and pecked me on the cheek, then vanished in a puff of shadows that I was almost positive was a purposeful dramatic effect because I’d never seen it before. I turned to Bella, who had been struck dumb by the interaction. “I thought you saw her before, why are you so shocked?”
Them having never met didn’t sound right. I was pretty sure Elena wasn’t the only one who had interacted with Callie. I might be misremembering though.
“I just thought she was a shadow,” she said in wonder. “I didn’t know she was your WIFE! Master, did you create a shadow wife? That’s…kind of weird. But cool maybe? I mean she was really detailed.”
I rolled my eyes at her nonsense. “My wife has shadow powers, and can communicate with them long distance. She’s an actual person, not a construct. Now, what the hell happened after I passed out. Archie is very helpful for a lot of things, but birds don’t have great attention spans and don’t seem to care much about past events.”
She laughed, holding up an arm, and my traitor bird trilled and swept down to land on her arm, where she started scritching him under his beak and then slipped him something that looked suspiciously like a hot coal. Since I was still waiting on an answer I didn’t comment, though I filed it away for later.
“Well, after you won, Archie landed and started healing you. Sister Bernadette appeared next to you and stood watch, and once you were…not bleeding from the eyes anymore, she brought you back here. I wasn’t there of course, but Elena told me. She came back with Bernadette this time too. Checking up on you I think, she’s really nice.”
“She is,” I agreed absently. I was still considering how to get her a scroll for her son. I wanted to help without blowing my cover, but I was quickly racking up quite a debt to her. Maybe I could just use Bael to sneak in and leave it for her in secret. I’d talk it over with Callie, that seemed like the kind of plan that sounded really good to me until I did it and realized I’d gotten tunnel vision and done something really stupid.
Bella continued on, not noticing my inner turmoil. “Sister Bernadette said that you have a week before the next trial, so you should get some rest. You’re in way better shape than last time, since your soul wasn’t damaged, and your body is mostly healed. She said your head might hurt for a while, apparently regrowing optical nerves causes strain.”
That made an unfortunate amount of sense, and explained my headache. At least it wasn’t some soul damage bullshit. That was what my immediate assumption had been.
Holding up my own arm, I waited for Archie to fly over. When he didn’t budge I cleared my throat loudly and he actually rolled his eyes at me before swooping over to land on my forearm with a slight clank. He flapped his wings and a corona of green flame surrounded me, soothing and rejuvenating me.
I laughed, thanking him for his effort, and then spent the rest of the night catching up with my apprentice. She’d been testing out her manifestation, and had lots to report that would be of use to me later.
All in all, it was far from the worst way I’d woken up from an involuntary nap. I’d been through five trials now, and only two were left. I was kind of excited to see what was coming. I hoped it wasn’t worse than this one, but I knew I couldn’t count on that. Still, I somehow doubted it would be pure physical again. This one had been about the limit of what a D-ranker could reasonably survive in terms of raw damage. Whatever it was though, I’d be ready. I had this, and nothing would stand in my way.