After waking up the next morning and stockpiling my wishes (ten with twenty five still in the hands of friends back home) I gathered Bella and headed out to meet Sister Bernadette. “I can’t believe I get to go with you this time!” My apprentice was squealing. “I want to see the trials you came here for. I bet you looked so cool resisting the pain like, ‘you shall not break me’!” She put on a deep pseudo demon voice that reminded me so much of Bethy it was genuinely terrifying.

“I looked like a shuddering, vomiting, crying mess,” I said bluntly. “She poisoned us without telling us, and it was agonizing. I THINK I have a way to counter it, though I’d be shocked if it’s completely effective. These trials were designed by a god.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Geeze, master. Maybe try to be a bit more dignified. Puking is gross.”

“My mistake,” I chuckled. “I’ll try to suffer in stoic silence next time. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you. Speaking of embarrassing, how is your movement technique? Still running into trees?”

“No!” She spat. Then she paused. “It was a cliff this time. It hurt.”

Rolling my eyes, I just shook my head. “You need to keep iterating. Change the story behind your technique in little ways, refine it. You can brute force techniques to make them work, but it’s easier to alter them to better suit you.” It was what I’d done with Limbo and Abomination Engine. Techniques leveraged Fantasy and the power of the soul as a medium to leverage your Path directly on the world around you. They were an embryonic form of Domain usage, and just like Domains, they needed compatibility.

She sighed. “I know. I remember. It’s just…this one is so fast. And honestly it might be TOO fast. But it feels like slowing it down would go against my Path. Escape Velocity has to be the fastest I can go.”

I hummed in understanding. “Well, I can’t exactly solve this for you.” I shrugged. “Techniques are deeply personal. I can give you the tools, but you have to figure out how it clicks for you. If it’s too fast for you to use functionally, it’s not a useful technique. Only you can decide how it needs to work.”

We kept walking in silence for a while, until we came to the clearing I’d been directed to, where Sister Bernadette was sitting on a stump. In front of her, a little doe was nuzzling her hand while a squirrel sat on her shoulder. She was cooing to the animals, seemingly enjoying just spending time with them. When we got closer, they heard us and took off, and she made a sad noise and stood, brushing off her habit.

“Sorry about that,” I told her with actual contrition. “Though I have to be honest. I didn’t expect a pain nun to be all buddy buddy with the animals.”

Giggling, she shook her head. “Animals are lovely creatures. Simple and uncomplicated. Humans can be layered and complex, the types of pain you need to go through to truly understand another human are as numerous as the stars in the sky. Animals, in contrast, only know a few types of pain. Hunger. Grief. Injury. If you’ve known these things, relating to an animal is simple enough.”

“That whole relating thing,” I asked cautiously. “Are you an ACTUAL Empath? Like is that literal?”

She shrugged. “What is empathy? A sense? An action? I connect to others through shared pain. Of course, I can only connect through pain that we’ve both endured. There are so many kinds of pain, I could never experience them all. But you and I have shared a pain, and so we are connected. Can’t you feel it?”

I couldn’t. I had a connection with someone already, and didn’t need any more. If Bernadette was really forming empathic connections with everyone she met….I shuddered at the thought.

“So,” I said, moving the conversation on. “What’s my next task. I was kind of figuring there would be more people here. Don’t tell me I’m the only one on the planet who decided to pursue the Lamentation trials?”

“Not at all.” She smiled serenely. “But the others won’t be joining us yet. There are seven trials that the Mistress demands her chosen persevere through. Only five will be done in the company of others. They will, in fact, be competitions. Those who last the longest will gain favor. However, before reaching the third trial and meeting your future brothers and sisters, you must prove yourself.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

I snorted. “The poison didn’t do that? Because lasting through that wasn’t easy.”

Her smile this time was sad. “I’m afraid not. This next trial…it is my least favorite. While all pain is beautiful because it gives understanding, some pains are a sad beauty. The next trial is a pain of the heart, and one I wish we didn’t have to inflict.”

“I’m not already infected with it am I?” I said cautiously, spinning around to see if I was standing in poison gas or something.

“No,” she responded softly. “This must be your own choice.” She withdrew a small bottle. “This is Lamentation oil. A holy sacrament of the lady. If you accept the trial, I will pour this over your head, and light it aflame. The flame burns away your courage, and you will be inflicted with not just agony, but crippling fear. A world where there is no safety. No shelter. Nowhere to run. You can give up at any time, but to succeed you must endure until the flames burn out.”

That was…ominous. My new domain would help with the pain, but I didn’t think it could eat emotions. And especially not a lack of them. It sounded hellish. But I’d been through worse. Nothing could be more horrible than the total isolation under which I’d broken my shackle in the Ruined Soul Temple. If I could withstand that I could handle anything.

“I’m in,” I said with a slow breath. “Go ahead and do it. If I can’t take it, you said I can give in? You have a way to put it out?”

She nodded solemnly, pulling out another bottle. “Water from an arctic spring on a light based planet. This will quell the flames and soothe your agony. Are you ready to start?” I nodded, and she stashed the second bottle, uncorking the first and upending it over my head. The glass was black tinted, the bottle unassuming and rectangular, and as she dumped it onto me, I grimaced at the strange feeling.

It was like…shampoo. More than anything else. A thick and viscous chill dumping into my hair and sloughing down the sides of my head, seeping into my armor at the neck and running down my chest and arms. It was almost freakishly cold, nearly burning my skin with the chill…and then she clicked her fingers, and the oil caught fire.

Pain. My world was consumed with pain. This wasn’t like the pain from the poison, this was so much deeper. A burning inside, eating away at my confidence. It hurt, sure, but worse than that was the fear. Was this going to permanently scar me, would Callie stop loving me, would people avoid me, would I lose feeling in my skin, would I lose my abilities? The fire seeped into my soul, dripping into the cracks in my courage and burning away inside me.

Crazy theories, absurd worries, a million different worst case scenarios. The air on my skin was eating away at me, animals circled above ready to attack, germs in the air could be infecting me. I didn’t scream, because I was so afraid that someone would hear and know I was vulnerable, so I stifled it, horrible broken noises erupting from my chest as I choked back my cries of agony.

I was crying, because of course I was. The world was awful and everything was trying to hurt me. I triggered Gluttony, just as a last resort, and I felt the physical pain leach away as it poured into the pit inside me. It wasn’t perfect. I still felt the pain, it was just brief, sliding through me and seeming to take hold less, but still hurting me on a surface level.

The fear didn’t end though, didn’t stop. I was hyperventilating, suffocating from unrelenting terror. I hadn’t wanted this, hadn’t been ready for this. No one was ready for this. I was going to die. I wanted to give up, but I was so paralyzed by terror I couldn’t bring myself to try to speak.

And then I felt something shift inside me. The fear started to crack, then recede. I dissected the worries, the trauma. Explained patiently to myself how unlikely each scenario was. It shouldn’t have worked, not out of nowhere, not when it hadn’t before. But then I realized what it was. Callie. She was lending me her courage. Giving me the strength that was being taken by the flames.

It felt like a thousand years I was burning. A million. But eventually the flames started to flicker and then went out, a sickly grey fire I only really saw toward the end guttered and vanished, leaving me whole and intact, not even ash in my hair.

I put my hands on my knees, panting, sweat dripping from every inch of me, throat sore from the screaming I’d been holding back. Bernadette stared at me sadly. “It takes true strength to endure such a trial.” She said gently. “The oil is a test that only our most pious undergo outside of selections like this. You’ve done very well.” She pulled a piece of paper from the air, passing it to me. “You’ve earned your place in the third selection.”

There were directions on the paper, and I memorized them before I put it away, just in case. “Thanks.” I rasped. “I’m going to go ahead and go.”

“I understand,” she said with a smile. “I know you may be upset with me for this. It is a cruel trial. But I’m very proud of you for the courage you showed, new brother. Please know that this particular pain is not one I inflict lightly, nor am I ignorant of the toll it demands. You’ve done well.”

I didn’t have the strength to respond with anything more than a nod. I turned and limped out of the clearing, Bella trailing behind. My muscles were sore and torn, violent cramps and seizing from the fear had caused very real damage that the fire hadn’t. My apprentice slid under my arm, propping me up. “I’ve got you, master.”

“So,” I croaked wryly. “What did we learn?”

“That not everything is an adventure.” Her voice was quiet and hollow. “Some things need to be done, but I need to be aware that they’ll cost me. That was…master, what could be worth paying that kind of cost?”

Smiling sadly, I just shook my head. “Family, Belladonna. Family.”

I didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t ask, which I was grateful for. My throat hurt and I was exhausted. I just wanted to walk in silence, and my apprentice seemed to have picked up on that desire. Given how much Bella talked, I was grateful for her forbearance. The whole trip could have been much worse.

In my soul, I felt a soothing trickle of warmth. Callie couldn’t use Zagan to heal me over a long distance, the power she had access to came from the bond so it didn’t work that way. Still, it was nice having her love and care patch the cracks in my psyche. Because there were still cracks. That flame had damaged me in a very real way, even if it hadn’t caused me physical harm. I hoped that whatever the next trial was, it was more physical and less metaphysical. I could deal with bodily harm, but this mental torment really fucked me up. I suppose I would see at the next trial. Only three days to go.