Topher trembled. In front of him, the blood-soaked figure continued smiling, its carious grin seeming to encompass his whole world.

He remembered.

"So," his shade remarked, picking its teeth with a thumbnail, "What's it like to be insane?"

Topher shuddered. "You'd know. The things you did..."

"The things you did," the shade corrected. "I'm you, remember, Chrissy? I'm Chris Bailey, the real Chris Bailey, the one who had to watch Mom die and get the shit kicked out of him by Dad every day!" The figure drifted closer, sneering. "You're just the pieces of what was left after they made me forget. The one who remembered the bullies and not what you did to them. The one who got to hate Dad from a distance, and not remember why Dad doesn't hit us anymore. Or go out in public. Or work."

Topher's hands felt dead, numb below his wrists. They were covered in so much blood that they couldn't feel anything anymore. "No."

"Just a voice on the phone to you." The figure picked its teeth again. "So you don't have to look at what's left of his face."

"What the fuck?" Topher's voice was small and dry; frail. "How the fuck can this be real?"

"You wanna talk about what's real?" His shade threw its arm wide, gesturing to the whole world. "You still think you're in some kind of fucking fantasy land! Chrissy the Hero, right?" Contemptuously, it struck him; the force of it rocked Topher back, his face burning. "Isn't that what you wanted, when you hid from the real world in your books and your comics?"

"No." Topher covered his face with his hands. "Shut up. You're lying."

"What's the matter, Chrissy, you forget those too?" The shade struck him again and again as Topher covered his head with his arms; each blow felt impossibly painful, impossibly personal. "That's right, just Topher the Boring, who only remembers watching TV and working shit jobs. The American Abstraction. Because anything real might break the therapy." His shade's voice was nearer now, almost inside his head. It is inside my head, Topher realized with a cold shock. "Well, watch the fuck out! Better not remember Dungeons and Dragons! Better not remember Record of Lodoss War! Because it might all come tumbling, tumbling down..." -- he felt boots in his stomach, his kidneys, his balls -- "...and then you might remember something bad! Like what Jimmy's face tasted like when you bit a chunk off. Or how Evan screamed when you --"

Topher was crumbling. His mind was coming apart. "I can't --"

Wait. Wait a minute.

Why couldn't he?

"Huh."

Slowly, Topher unhunched; by degrees, his back straightened. Phantom blows still struck his most sensitive areas; phantom claws still raked his flesh, phantom teeth still bit and scourged him. But it wasn't real; he knew that. Trauma. The school gave me hypno-therapy, the 90s kind they don't do anymore. It's so fucking basic. He raised his head; the shade still harried him, kicking and punching and biting and clawing, but his body wasn't being harmed. This is wrong; worse, it's dumb. I don't have multiple personalities. Something's still fucking with me.

"The fuck you doing, Chrissy?" His shade demanded, an infinite sea of blood dripping from his teeth and fingers. "You got something better to do than pay for all the years you ignored me?"

"Yeah." Topher didn't flinch. "Like finding out what's really happening here."

I can't actually be hurt like this. The Mage Shield prevents blows as long as I have MP. It's something in here with me. Inside my mind. But real.

Topher sucked in a deep breath, blocked out his shade, and summoned up a memory.

It was easy; his mind was raw, bloody, and vivid, clawed open by his recollections and revelations. And so when he summoned up his visual memory of the illustration from the tome in Dakath's shop -- every connection between every rune in existence -- the trance came easily. He raised his hands, palms open and inward, in front of him as akasha spewed out of him; the flow emerged from his right hand and was absorbed by his left, completing the circuit of his intention.

"The fuck you doing?" howled the shade again. "You think your stupid fake wizard powers can scare me?"

"Oh, shut up. You're not even real." Topher began to bring his hands together. "But something is. And I'm gonna find it."

Topher's hands met.

Instantly, space shattered around him; he was back in the no-space he'd been in when he fought Kelfir, but this time there was no competing akasha to blind him to what he was really seeing. Like a hall of infinite mirrors, he surrounded himself; everything was him here, and there was nowhere left to hide. His mind, savaged and brutalized, was nonetheless finally clear; he could see everything, recognize everything, and remember everything. The dark hollows of his memory opened, vomiting out every buried secret, every repressed wound, and he reached inside himself like he'd done to defeat his murderous urge the last time he'd been here; horrors streamed past and through him as he regarded himself from within and outside of himself simultaneously.

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Hotaka's body. Screeching wails from bullies he'd torn apart. His mother's face, slack and still as she lay limply in the pink-watered bathtub; wrists gaping wounds like screams. His father's terrified eyes, looking up at him as Topher saw his own feet stomp down again, again, again. But buried in the bottom, beneath memories and sorrows thrown up like a protective cover against discovery, was the real culprit; the shimmering, almost-nonexistent writhing thing, wormlike and artificial, that had burrowed into him and built a horrific revenant from what it had found slumbering inside. This was what was wrong; this was what had turned a series of unpleasant memories and night terrors into a dark urge, a traitor mind within his own, that had been wielding murderous power ever since he'd fallen into its grasp in the darkness. Tendrils of perverse vitiation, reaching out to trap and preserve the long-dead citizens of a forgotten empire so old all memory of it was dust, woven in a web around the dead heart of an ancient machine.

He reached out, desperate to excise and destroy it, but it resisted him like a tombstone of inevitability within his will; Edict, he remembered. Nothing I can do with magic can affect it. But he knew now that there was something here, something real; even if he couldn't fight it, just knowing about it was enough. And so instead, he brought it to the surface; he artfully and expertly wove his mind and his perceptions around it not to conceal, but to reveal, giving him full sight of it and awareness of what it was doing.

As the full scope of its complexity became unraveled before him, he marveled at its artistry; it was nothing more than a pure expression of empowerment, a clever Mij-Danx-Zu-Rosh recursive tensor that held the mind in living suspension, rebuilding and reviving the physical structures of his neurology as long as it persisted. With a twist of Jhu, he realized, it would have lasted forever; the citizens of Wanbourne would have been truly undying, unstoppable and inevitable. But either that had not been its architect's design, or they had failed to find the vectors in runespace that would have allowed such a sustainable construct; and he realized that it would only persist as long as he was alive. Which was fine. He didn't need to be a zombie. He just needed to be Topher.

Thoughtfully, he left the filament -- the lex animus, he realized -- untouched; instead, he rearranged his own mind, wrapping the truths of his own personality around its raw and grasping edges. He didn't need to bury himself. He had to accept himself. And it was easy, much easier than he'd ever imagined it could be; he could see every element of his own consciousness, knowing which to alter where to avoid being altered himself in any way he didn't wish to be. In moments, he annealed himself with Metaphrasty; with the golden threads of akasha, he made kintsugi of his fractures and shatterings. He couldn't fix everything; griefs and sorrows and hatreds would remain, because they were as much a part of him as his joys and his desires. But he could untangle them; come to grips with them. Make them part of himself.

He could do anything to himself he wanted, he realized; purge his fear, sharpen his mind, alter his mannerisms in any way he desired. But he knew, without having to think, that to do so would be to break the tenuous loop between who he was and how he was changing himself; and, in doing so, he would scatter himself across himself in a broken, twisted tangle of cross-purposes. He would probably survive, he knew; but he wouldn't be himself anymore.

Well, maybe that wouldn't be so bad.

But, in the end, it wasn't worth the risk; instead, Topher simply cleaned himself up, sutured together what wounds he could, and wrapped himself around the lex animus, turning his own mind inward and bending it into a sophic toroid that the animus spiraled around and through. And, instead of animating his dark desires, his loneliness, and his self-loathing, it simply fed back into itself. A pulse of wakefulness, of rejuvenation, shot through Topher, he realized he'd succeeded; his mind was now, finally, his own. He hadn't really fixed anything, he knew -- the traumas and urges were still buried within his mind, and it would take him a lot longer than a few minutes of autochirurgery to actually deal with them; it'd probably take him years to even understand and sort through all the repressed memories alone. But now they were only memories and urges; he would at least be spared the tedious drama of having to physically grapple with an ersatz personification of his Id.

He smirked to himself, realizing the final truth of what had happened; his subconscious, recognizing the invading presence, had channeled it into something so ridiculously dramatic that his conscious mind wouldn't be able to ignore or rationalize it. Shorn of the amplifying influence of the animus, he could see his excruciations for what they really were -- his mother's suicide, surrounded by a handful of violent incidents in his teenage years. Rough, sure -- he probably did need to find somebody with the Therapist Class eventually, he supposed -- but nothing to break a mind. Nothing epic or sinister or worthy of an extended psychotic break; just normal, everyday awfulness, of the sort that most people were probably dealing with. Refreshing, really.

Yeah, well, good job, me. Now I just have to deal with the shit that actually matters.

Slowly, he extricated himself from himself, and then from the space around him which was the akashic extension of himself yet again; and, dropping back into reality, he realized he was not alone.

An older man stood in front of him; he was robed in gray, and a large bushy gray beard jutted forth from his cheeks. He bore himself with an aspect of exhaustion; he leaned upon a gnarled gray staff, and his eyes were like tired half-moons. But Topher saw the truth; that this weary old man's gaze was like a diamond-cutter, auguring straight through to the heart of whatever was before him. And what was before him at this moment, unfortunately, was Topher, who really didn't have the mental capacity to deal with this right now and would much rather spend at least a few seconds grappling with the horrifying realization that his suppressed teenage self had been a fucking nerd who played Dungeons and Dragons.

Topher sighed. Never two seconds to rest. Opening his palms to show his defenselessness, he bowed. "Archmage Aumraham."