(Year 997, 17th of Full Inji, 12:??AM)

I had to wonder, as we walked deeper into the cave, how much further there was to go. The cave entrace had run directly into the cliffside, but I had no way of knowing how far the cave could go... or how deep underground. I knew there was further to go, at least, since my goal was still the Monster, and I could still feel the tugging on my heart that was leading me toward it - forward, and down.

I did have to admit, though, that it was getting harder. I hadn't realized how badly I'd been scratched until Shimmer pointed it out, but she was right - I was bleeding from scratches all over my arms and shoulders where the Chaos-touched bats had scratched me, plus I was still a bit off-balance from the bats that had just slammed into me over and over. I wasn't going to give up, though... I didn't want to give up. I was so deep in the cave already - if I gave up here, what would even be the point of getting hurt like this?

The path had been easy, at least. I would swear that I'd heard the occasional rat or bat as I'd made my way further in, but only a few were scattered around, hiding in corners - none that confronted me like the pack of rats or the flock of bats had.

My first sign that I was getting properly close to the Monster, in hindsight, wasn't any trace of the creature itself... it was a change in the air. It's hard to describe exactly what changed, though. It wasn't that the air was smokey, it wasn't thick enough for that. The air didn't seem heavy - if anything, it seemed light, like the air was actually thinner so deep in the cave. When I breathed in and out, though, it was like the air was somehow sharp. There was a slight stinging, a slight burning, wherever the air touched me. It didn't hurt, not exactly, but it would've been impossible to ignore.

The second sign of the Monster was more obviously connected to it: Around the same time as the air changed, that tug I felt inside became tangibly stronger. I suddenly wasn't sure if I could stop my feet from moving me forward, even if I tried. I did try, and I could stop, but it felt wrong. Why would I stop this close to my goal? I'd come this far, fought off whatever stood in my way, dealt with the pain of my wounds... there would be no use in stopping.

Besides, I had a job to do.

I had to kill the Monster.

"Aedan," Shimmer prompted me, but I just held up my hand. We were close, I could feel it, and sure enough, when I turned one last corner, torch held out in front of me...

It was hard to make out the shape in front of me, and it took me a moment to realize why: The shape was changing. The creature in front of me looked like a rat, at first - a giant rat, but still a rat - but then its head started growing, while the rest of its body started shrinking. Its skin bulged and rippled, body mass shifting in place to make this change of form possible.

I took a step back, and the Monster's growing head snapped towards me. I watched its eyes open - three of them, none of them where a rat's eyes ought have been, all full of pure, shining orange light.

The Monster's growl echoed through the cave, deep and rumbling, as it righted itself to step toward me. I took one more step back and then stopped myself, bracing my back foot in place. I hadn't been prepared for what I was about to fight, sure, but that wasn't the end of the world. I'd fought things before. I'd killed things before. How could this be any different?

My foolishness became obvious almost immediately. Remembering that the Monster was supposed to think of nothing but violence, I simply hefted my stick and waited for the horror to come to me. That was exactly what it did, running at first on oversized ratlike legs, but then it grew a set of legs that seemed rounder - rabbit's legs, I would realize later, and pounced into the air, coming in for a kill.

I did hit the Monster, and quite cleanly. I hit it so hard, in fact, that my stick broke in halves, and the sudden collision knocked the both of us off-balance. The Monster tumbled to the ground, and I fell on top of it. What I had not been prepared for, when I landed on the Monster, was for the beast to sprout more legs upward from its back and kick me away, sending me sprawling in the other direction. When I got to my feet, the Monster seemed to have recognized that I wasn't a one-and-done foe... but it also seemed to be completely unharmed.

Not yet realizing what that meant, I [Expel]'d another stick to raise against it, bracing myself again. Sure enough, the Monster charged and leapt at me again... but when I swung my stick, there was no Monster there to hit. I turned around, understanding too late that the Monster had sprouted bat's wings mid-leap and flapped up over my head, and saw the creature wheeling back around to drop down on me like a falling boulder. The bats that lived in this cave had tried to attack me the same way, but they had a limited amount of weight to throw against me. The Monster was heavier, much more so, and it smashed me down to the ground. My stick went flying out of my grip, and I found my breath becoming short.

"Sh- Shimmer..." I gasped. Shimmer was hovering above us, staring down, and I could swear that there was a hint of judgement in her normally-expressionless face.

The Monster stomped down on my chest, sending me into a wheezing spasm, while Shimmer spoke from above, "Physical weapons may prove unfit to fight a creature so maladapted to the physical laws of our world. If you are to survive, you must find another way."

Another way... to hurt the Monster? It was hard to imagine another way, but Shimmer clearly had a point - The Monster clearly had no trouble hurting me, as it proved by stomping down on me again, so I needed to find a way to hurt it, and I needed to figure that out quickly.

The need for quickness became even greater as the Monster sank its teeth into my shoulder. The sensation was... absolutely bizarre. I could feel the pain of the bite, feel my skin tearing open under sharp fangs, but the fangs themselves felt wrong. They burned to the touch, but they also felt soft, almost sludgy... totally incapable of ripping me open. They somehow managed it, though, and that brought me back to what Shimmer kept telling me: The Monster came from a place where the laws of this world did not exist. Being inside of this world forced the Monster to obey those laws, but clearly it couldn't manage that... clearly, the rules were still bending around it.

How could I hurt something like that, though? And worse, I realized with a shudder that didn't quite reach every part of my body...

With my shoulder torn open, I couldn't move my left arm. How could I hurt the Monster with just one arm?

Sticks and stones were out of the question, given what Shimmer had said about physical harm, but unless I was forgetting something, that only left my fire, and I needed both hands in order to...

That was when it hit me. Did I need both hands to conjure fire? Shimmer had told me to do it that way when I was trying to light the fire and cook the meat, but I remembered, with a flash and a wince, a moment from the night before - my hand reaching out toward Bishop Mordecai in anger, unleashing a burst of fire at him.

I remembered the Bishop screaming out in pain, too, but it was hard to recall the sound of his voice when the sound of my own, wheezing and grunting from the pain in my shoulder, was ringing in my ears.

To make fire during the day, I'd just imagined heat coming from one hand and light coming from the other... what had I done to make fire when I threw it at the Bishop?

It was hard to think with the Monster's face still deep in my shoulder, but I tried my best to think: What had I done?

It was Shimmer's voice, coming down from above again, that gave me an answer: "Feel the heat within you, and let it flow."

Feel the heat... feel the heat... I could feel heat, alright. I could feel the heat of the blood in my shoulder as it left my body, and I could feel the burning of the Monster's unnatural body against my own.

I could also feel another heat, I realized... another heat, inside me, in my face and in my chest. A heat that made me scrunch up my eyes and grit my teeth...

The same heat I'd felt last night, watching Bishop Mordecai smile as a good woman died.

"Shimmer was right," I gasped, trying to hold onto that heat and give it a direction, "You just hate the rules, don't you?" The Monster didn't react, but I continued, "This world works a certain way, and you don't like that. You don't like rules. " I was wheezing, still, from the pain and from the weight on top of me, but I continued. "You've gotta follow them, though. That's why you hate being in this world, because that's the price of being here - if you're gonna hang around in this world, you've gotta follow its rules, just like the rest of us. You can throw a fit about it, you can hurt people because you're so angry, but in the end, the rules are absolute..."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I raised my right hand, now beginning to release light, and pressed against the side of the Monster's neck. The Monster stung to touch, almost like hot food, but I curled my fingers and got the tightest grip I could. "So here's one rule you might like to know: Fire, at a basic level, is just light and heat. If you pull a fire apart, those are the two basic components you'll find. Which is why, if you were to put those components back together..."

"Feel the heat," Shimmer had said, so I felt it. I called upon the heat and light within me, and I paid attention to the feeling of it flowing out from that impossible space inside me, out toward my palms. Once I was certain I could feel it fully, I tried to grasp onto that feeling, to control it and make it mine, to make it flow where I chose.

I hadn't expected it to be so easy. Not just like slipping a key into a lock - slipping a key into the lock, the one it had been made for. A perfect fit.

I could still see the light shining out from under my palm where it was trying to grasp onto the Monster's neck, and I now I could feel heat under my palm too, increasing by the moment. A rumble seemed to go through the monster, shaking it from tip to tail, and it stopped gnawing on my shoulder for a moment. Did it realize what was happening?

If it did, it had realized too late, because one more second was all it took for heat and light to blossom together, and I watched a fire ignite under my fingertips.

I couldn't help but grin. I'd done it.

Another snarling bite from the Monster, though, made me realize I was wrong. The Monster didn't seem hurt... not yet. Maybe a creature of Chaos couldn't...?

No. I shook my head. This needed to work - a need I felt all the more urgently as stinging fangs sunk deeper into my shoulder. I couldn't imagine any other option that could deal with the Monster. I had to make this work... And with one more spark of thought, I knew just how to do that.

I cleared my throat. "Now, uh - as if that weren't bad enough for you, here's another rule: It doesn't matter what you're made of, how tough you are, or how much of you there is. Nothing is completely immune to fire. No matter what you're trying to set alight, if you just keep raising the heat up higher and higher..."

My hand, now completely on fire, wrapped tighter around the monster's neck. "Sooner or later, it. Will. Burn."

The noise the Monster made when it released its grip on my shoulder was wrong, unworldly, like a rat and a bat and a wolf and a hare and so many other things all screamed in agony at the same time, somehow from the same throat. The fire had finally taken on its neck, and now it was spreading all over. The smoke was thick, and it burnt my nose worse than any smoke I'd ever breathed before, so I tried my best to crawl away. This wasn't hard - the Monster had run away from me already, and it was currently bashing itself against the cave wall nearby, trying and failing to put out the fire against the rock.

"And-" I nearly choked on my words. "Eugh... And one last rule for you, bastard. Third rule of fire: It [Consumes]." I could feel my entire body tingling now, and not just the way my nose was tingling. "The fire doesn't just erase you, it eats you. You are food for the fire. Whatever it touches, it just turns into more fire." As I watched, the fire on the Monster seemed to be doing exactly that: Spreading across its body, now lighting up its entire head and most of its writhing body. "If you can't put it out, that's it. You're done. You die... and fire and smoke are all that's left."

And so my words became true. The Monster was now completely on fire, smoke billowing up from it, and the dark shape inside the fire was just a writhing mass of something, unable to force itself into a shape any longer, slowly shrinking as the fire ate more and more of it away...

I watched the Monster burn, as I lay on the floor aching and trying not to inhale to much smoke, until every last bit of it had burnt away, and the fire finally died out.

Shimmer, who had been hovering above us until then, lowered herself back down into eyesight, much closer to my level. Looking down at me, she asked, "Aedan... What, precisely, did you just do?"

"I think..." I had to take a moment to focus, while I pushed myself up into a sitting position with my working arm. "I think I tricked it? At first I was just talking myself through making the fire, but then I started thinking about what you were saying before, about the rules of our world and the way the Monster doesn't like following them... And I guess something clicked in my brain. I thought... maybe it does want to follow the rules? Maybe it tries?"

Shimmer seemed unconvinced, so I added, "I mean... If I had to follow rules in order to be safe and comfortable, I'd try to follow them, right? I wouldn't just get angry at the rules for existing, I'd get angry if the rules that were supposed to keep me safe and comfortable... Well, if they didn't." Looking down at the fire still alight in my hand, I couldn't help but think of the fire at home again, and Miss Ambrose burning. "So I thought... maybe that's what happened to the Monster. Maybe it tried to follow the rules of our world, but it couldn't for some reason, or it didn't work... and that's what made it so angry." I closed my palm, sucking the fire back in. "And then I thought, well, if the Monster does want to follow the rules... maybe I just had to give it some new rules to follow."

Shimmer nodded. "Rules that worked out well for you, in the end."

I nodded back. "Yeah..." I couldn't keep myself from glancing over at the ash where the Monster had been. "Yeah, I guess."

I inhaled sharply. The Monster was dead. I'd killed it, or tricked it into dying, or... whatever I'd just done.

So, why... Why could I still feel that tugging on my heart? Why did the air still sting to breathe? What other source of Chaos was there for me to find?

I shook my head. It didn't matter. I'd come this far... It wasn't like there was much left to go back to behind me. With this question left in my mind, the only direction I could imagine going was forward, toward answers.

"Aedan, your wounds..." Shimmer started, but when it became clear that I wasn't listening, she just hovered in silence while I got to my feet and shuffled forward, deeper into darkness.

Fortunately, I didn't even have much further to walk.

I'd hardly even realized it during the fight with the Monster, but I could still see in the dark, even after the torch had died. As I walked deeper into the darkness, it became clear why: There was light now. It had barely lit the room where I'd found the monster, but the further I walked, the brighter it seemed, casting a sharper relief of the cave walls in a colour... what colour was that? Was I so tired that I couldn't recognize colours anymore?

When I rounded the final turn, I just had to stare. I hadn't prepared myself to find anything beyond the Monster, but even if I'd been able to set any expectations at all for myself, I could never have expected... a hole.

There was a hole in one of the walls of the cave, at the very furthest and deepest point. That strange light spilled forth from it, but so did a faint stream of smoke. The edges of the hole were blackened, like they'd been scorched by fire, but the edges somehow also seemed sharp, like it had been cut into the cave wall by some strange knife.

The hole, of course, was the direction I'd been pulled toward. It was possible that the tugging in my heart would lead me through the hole if I followed it, but in my gut, I knew that the hole was what I was here for.

Weakly, totally at a loss for words, I had nothing left to ask but, "Shimmer...?"

Shimmer's voice was low, incredulous. "That is... a Chaos Rift. On the other side of that hole is the Primordium, from which the Path of Chaos draws strength. Why or how there is a Rift here, I cannot imagine, but this is where the Monster came from, Aedan, and..." Shimmer trailed off for a moment before she continued, "And in time... more Monsters will emerge from the Rift, unless it is closed."

I just stared at the Rift, taking that in, and sighed. "So... we need to close it."

Shimmer seemed surprised, suddenly. "And how do you propose to do that?"

I took a step toward the Rift and reached out toward it with my good arm, saying "Well, there must be something-"

That was where Shimmer cut my off, yelling "Aedan!" but it was too late.

As I reached out to touch the rift, something like a hand shot out from it, gripping onto my wrist. The touch burned, and there was a sound like laughter, but before either of us could do anything else, I found myself lifted up off my feet in a sudden movement. There was a sudden flash of light, and then -

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(Year 997, 1?th of Full Inji, ??:??AM)

I fell to the ground hard, unprepared and disoriented. I had no idea what had just happened, but now I was flat on my back on the cave floor, and suddenly there was growling, and that smell...

The smell of Monster. Had another come out of the Rift...? No, that couldn't be right, could it?

What had just happened didn't necessarily matter, because right now, turning my head frantically had revealed that there were three Monsters on differentsides of me, and now they'd all noticed me. That fall had seemingly knocked all the energy out of my body, though - I couldn't move, I could hardly breathe, and every part of me felt like it had been burned. I could muster a flame in my good hand, but I couldn't even lift my hand to try my trick again.

Rather than worry about any of that, though... my mind focused on a small detail I'd observed: I could see real light in the edge of my vision, if I looked away from the Rift, and it was getting brighter.

That was the last thing that made much sense before the fighting started. One of the Monsters leapt at me, and I felt its claws digging into my wounded arm. The other two Monsters had to be getting closer, but that was when I noticed heavy footsteps coming into earshot, and then the yelling started. I'd scrunched my eyes shut, trying not to watch the Monster attack me, but instead the clawing stopped, and I could hear the sounds of the Monsters crying out while weapons bit into them.

The fighting was over in moments. Whoever had come into the cave, they'd cut through the Monsters like they were just normal animals.

I heard the gruff voice of an older man say, "Bart, you know the drill. Gotta get this thing sealed. Merry, take a look at... shit, is that a kid?"

Another man's voice grumbled, "I don't remember any-fuckin'-one saying any-fuckin'-thing about a kid..."

A woman's voice agreed. "No, they specifically told us the Monsters hadn't got to anybody yet. Looked to be true up until now, so I'm thinking this... is a new development. Help me check him, Clarence."

I tried to open my eyes and look at these new people, but I realized that I couldn't - I could open my my eyes just a crack, but when I did, my vision was just so blurry...

The first man who spoke, the one who sounded older, seemed to notice me struggling. "Merry, his eyes, I think he's still... shit, if he's still alive, then his arm -"

My body felt heavy, I realized. Maybe it was something more, but after the day I'd had... maybe this was just my exhaustion catching up to me.

That was what it had to be, right?

One of the last things I heard was someone coming down hard next to me - one of these people falling to their knees next to me. I felt a sudden warmth as the older man said, "Alright, kid, come on there... stay with us..."

I did want to do that, don't get me wrong, but with my eyes fighting to stay closed and this feeling of warmth spreading through me...

It was so much easier to just sleep.

"Kid!"