The following morning, Theloseus had cancelled training while the discussion of the appearance of Miasma Incarnate– the unheard of zeroith number– had taken place with Elvidia and all the elders of the tribe. Seven remained in his hut, sleepless, hollow, his face devoid of emotion, yet his eyes were glinting with the fire of unrestricted thoughts. Siren had tried everything to get even a word out of Seven, but the shaken boy remained as silent as the world was in that fateful encounter.
At some point, the thoughts slowed, the fire dulled and Seven's eyes dropped closed. He slipped into the dreamscape almost immediately, the newest scene was a man on his knees in front of a mass grave. Standing above him, on top of the corpses, was another man. A man with the same torn zero on his left arm as Melrod, but it wasn't Melrod.
"How pitifully weak you are. You gave up before anything ever began. You should have just accepted your design if you were going to fail at the first hurdle." The man on the ground turned to Seven and spoke. The voice came out hauntingly hollow, no facial features could be seen, just shadow. A pair of glowing golden eyes streaming golden tears was all that could be discernable. As soon as the voice spoke, the wind picked up and carried the smell of fresh blood, the slightly metallic fishy smell brought Seven slightly to his senses.
"That was no hurdle! Hell, that wasn't even an obstacle! That– that was an immoveable brick wall at eighty miles an hour! That was my best fucking friend! Alive and well, but gone in a way that is worse than just simple death!" Seven yelled back at the knelt man. His rational mind was scattered, leaving only the raw emotional heart to speak.
"So? A brick wall is a brick wall– is an obstacle. You faltered at the first cosmic attack, you wallowed in self-loathing, guilt, thoughts of 'What if I did this instead?'. Face your loss. Go choose the design, accept destiny." The man turned away, his voice taunting yet tinged with disappointment.
"You know what? How about you just go fuck yourself! Who the fuck are you to tell me when I failed? You have no idea what the fuck I'm going through!" Seven cursed at the figure and even started approaching it aggressively while clenching his fists in his grief fueled rage. The figure stood abruptly, his hand clasped around Seven's throat as if he materialized within its grasp.
"I KNOW THIS PAIN MORE THAN A MERE PISSANT LIKE YOU WOULD! THIS IS YOUR FAILURE!" Seven was thrown into the pile of disfigured, shadow enveloped corpses. For a dream, the stiffness of the bodies, the wet squelch of blood seeping into his clothes, the stench clinging to his nose. It was too real, Seven's heart began to race, fear seeped into his clouded emotions.
"W–what the fuck?" Seven scrambled to get off the bodies, but the gaze of the zero holding figure above, froze Seven. The approach of its heavy felled footsteps vibrated through the stiffened bodies. Seven slowly looked up, and into its cold orange eyes.
"Don't get up. Get up, and this is the future. Struggle is futile when faced against inevitability. Your weakness shows cracks, cracks can be exploited, turning them into fissures." This voice was colder, perfectly certain. It spoke with a conviction proven through countless cycles of life. A voice so ancient, the words sounded cryptic.
"Or get up, and prove who you are. Why falter at the first step? Have you not proven you were better than me?" A familiar voice spoke from within the corpses. Seven snapped his attention to the corpse next to him. It was Aisrin, the perfect version of himself. Eyes gouged, blackened blood pouring from every orifice. Seven began to panic more, what kind of nightmare was this?
"You are human. You are not some hero who's out to save everyone. That's impossible to begin with. Just because you lose one, doesn't mean you lost everything." The crying figure spoke again, the panic vanished, his heart steadied.
"Melrod was the closest thing to family I had. But the cosmos— The Cosmos." Seven's voice dropped an octave on the second mention. Hatred coldly dripped its venom in his words.
"I have nothing more to say. Figure it out on your own. I'll be here, waiting for you to fall to inevitability." The voice coldly dismissed Seven, and the dreamscape changed, the scene unfocusing in a way that looked like wet mud. Around him were spires of Earth, turning inward towards him. The space beyond the rocky tendrils was nothing but a smoky void.
Seven's rage was still fresh, not at the entities from earlier, but from the cosmos and its imposement of cruel balance. He felt as if he was being mocked. As if he were some tortured jester in a tyrannical king's court. The angrier he got, the sharper the spires. Thorns sprouted towards him, sinking closer to him. Red cracks of magma spread slowly throughout. His number pulsed furiously, a color never seen before. The hidden color of the light, Ultra Violet.
His fury became more than just a fire in his heart, it began to radiate, its pressure forming larger fissures for the magma in the spires to grow. The feeling was too vivid, too real. A sudden wet coldness enveloped him. It startled him, the shock was more than enough to wake him. The hut around him had vanished, in its place was rapidly cooling, twisted tendrils of molten earth. Elves surrounded him, exhausted, pale and terrified. Steam filled the air where water had evaporated, water that had been magically poured into the eruption through the tired Elves' desperation to stop the destruction.
Seven stared at the horrific beauty of the carnage he evoked. A power he unleashed, a power he held. Around the edges of the hardening magma, several small mammals were dead, charred or injured. But what made his blood run cold, was the ashen statue of an Elf, frozen in a permanent flee of terror. His anger had unintentionally taken innocent lives.