A guttural groan tore from his throat as his eyes slowly fluttered open. Every fiber of his being screamed in protest yet, every muscle screamed with a deep and pervasive ache well his bones throbbed with echoing pain that made him fell as if each and every one of them had been turned to powder and then pressed back into their original shapes. Even the simple act of breathing sent fresh stabs of agony through his chest. It was a comprehensive, all-encompassing misery that made him wish for continued unconsciousness.
"I really hope this isn't what it'll be like when I get really old," he muttered, the words a raw whisper against the strange formless quiet that surrounded him. He slowly forced himself to stand, an action that demanded far more effort than it should have, forced to once more rely on his chains to keep upright as each movement brought a fresh agony that seemed to exceed the limits of physical possibility as he braced himself against an invisible wave of nausea from the pain well his head swam.
As the worst of the pain subsided into a dull roar, John cast his gaze around, trying to discern his surroundings. This wasn't a familiar room, or even any place he recognized from the physical world. It was just a void and yet not an empty one. A hazy, shifting gray expanse seemed to stretched endlessly in every direction, dotted with faint, pulsing motes of light that appeared and vanished like distant, dying stars. The air felt thick and each breath could be seen as a mist in cold weather well vibrating with an unspoken hum. "Now where the hell have I ended up this time?" he questioned the emptiness. "The last thing I remember was an agonizing pain as if I was being put through a shredder, bathed in acid and burnt all at the same time before Braedon finally talking and telling me he would handle things." A flicker of worry flashed through his mind. "I really hope he doesn't cause too much trouble of things have gone the way I think they have." John said with a weary sigh. "But then again, he's always been the calm, calculating type, no offense to the others but if his out and about in my body like I think he is then it's definitely better than one of the darker ones or him..." He shivered involuntarily, the thought of some of his more volatile mental manifestations taking the reins sent a fresh wave of unease through him. If the chaos they already cause from time to time in his mindscape was any indication, they would no doubt become known terrors in his reality if ever released to do as they pleased.
"Well bud, that ain't very nice, is it, ya?" A distorted voice, gravelly yet strangely familiar, sliced through the ethereal silence, drawing John's attention. What greeted him was a bizarre, unsettling mirror image of himself. This entity wore John's face, but everything else was a stark reversal. Instead of his typical red top, it sported black. His black pants were replaced by an aggressive, almost glowing red. Its skin, unnervingly, was an inky black, absorbing what little light existed in this mental plane, while its eyes were stark, luminous white, like those of a blind man, save for two impossibly tiny, obsidian pinpricks in the very center.
"Hahaha, Yami? Damn, so I really am in some corner of my mind right now and you pretty much heard all my thoughts there didn't you?" John said, a wry grin fighting through his pain. "Normally, I'm still somewhat aware and conscious when I come here, never fully in it well conscious of it but forgetting most things when I wake, I take it this is the very edge of my mindscape if you're the one here?" He asked but Yami, with a mischievous glint in his stark white eyes cut him off.
"Ya always know I like ta watch the specks and enjoy all the silence here but yeah, this time you're fully in ya mind, like those few times ya arrived here in dreams, ya know? And now you're no doubt wondering why and why ya can't sense or know what's going on outside ya?" Yami finished, a knowing smirk playing on his lips, revealing perfectly white, sharp teeth.
"Along with wondering why you say 'ya' so much now, you didn't seem to have such a tick before," John quipped, his grin widening, a testament to his enduring humor even in distress. Yami responded with a low growl, a sound that vibrated more in John's skull than in the silent air.
"Well, sorry princy, for trying ta be different, ya," Yami retorted in a huff though the wide, unsettling grin that stretched his dark face showed he didn't genuinely mind the remark, recognizing it as the playful jab it was.
"So, onto serious matters, ya?" Yami's demeanor shifted, the playful mischief replaced by a stark unsettling gravity. His luminous eyes bore into John's, conveying a chilling urgency. "You almost killed yourself bud. That fight with the self-titled 'Keeper' thing? It wrecked ya soul up something fierce. If we weren't around and you didn't have some of those weird undead things in ya head with us along with the little witch you took in, you would be far past dead. Ya would have woken up, felt sore for a couple hours and then just… stopped existing. The pain ya felt right before Braedon swapped out? That was your damn soul fraying at the edges, unraveling like an old rope as it tore into the rest of your soul."
John's wry grin returned, a defense mechanism against the morbid revelation. "Well, wouldn't be the first time I almost died from something right? both in the real world and on the plane side of things." But the flippancy died on his lips as he met Yami's unwavering and serious gaze, the glint in his inverted eyes deepening to something akin to genuine fear. The sheer weight of Yami's words settled upon him, a cold dread that eclipsed even his physical pain.
"You don't seem to get it do ya, It's not like the time you had a random asthma attack out of nowhere and where dead for a few seconds or when you had that reaction to bee stings, its also not a matter of death on the planes where you wake up in the morning. It's far beyond that!" Yami stressed, his voice losing its distorted edge as it became sharper and more direct. "In the real world as ya called it, everyone has a predetermined time for their passing. It's why some people just collapse and die well others can be shot, stabbed, fall from a super high place and in the more extreme cases, get struck by lightning and somehow not just live but walk away as if nothing had happened. It's because their time wasn't ready yet, their thread of fate was still strong. But those shmucks playing god screwed it all up. From what we could gather from the pair of visitors we had right as your reality change karma, fate, life, death—whatever balances existed in everything—were chucked right out the window bud. Now, events in ya 'dreams' that once would just leave you sore after waking can full-on kill ya permanently or cause far worse shit ta happen to ya." Yami's voice rose slightly, the urgency clear, hammering the point home with chilling finality.
Rubbing his temples, John felt a fresh wave of exasperation mix with the growing dread. "So now I have to be as aware when I sleep as I am when I'm awake?" he asked, needing to clarify the insane implications. "You realize how difficult that will be? Often, a person doesn't even realize they're in a dream. Even I have a lot of difficulty differentiating between reality and dream most of the time. Hell, more often than not I just blend into the dreamscape and only realize it's not reality after the fact. Cases where I am fully aware that I'm not physically awake only happen once or twice a month at most if I'm lucky." He exclaimed, the sheer impossibility of the demand weighing heavily on him. The concept was not just difficult; it was psychologically exhausting, bordering on an inescapable nightmare.
"I gettcha, bud, I really do," Yami said, his voice softening slightly, though the grin returned, wide and uncomfortably enthusiastic. "It's why we'll be doing the best we can for ya. The recent changes, though drastic, did give us a bit more leverage to work with, some more freedom if ya will, ways to exert our influence." He didn't elaborate on the nature of this 'freedom,' but the glint in his eye suggested there was power John had yet to fully grasp or even hope to understand.
"And first things first is fixing ya soul up and getting it back together, or at least stable enough that we will all survive and you can recover naturally. Right now it's like a wool sweater knitted by ya grandma who hasn't knitted in her life while jumped up on coke and coffee and not the cold drink kind of coke either, I'm talking the nose sugar variety. It's got holes and points sticking out everywhere, a complete and utter mess. To help though, uhm… we all may have kinda pushed parts of ourselves into the gaps and mixed all of it with ya, similar to how most of us took a tiny bit of ya energy and self to anchor onto ya, but well it was even those who hadn't done that who pushed a bit of themselves to help with patching ya up." Yami delivered the last part somewhat reluctantly, his eyes darting away like a naughty child caught playing with fire, clearly bracing for John's outburst as what they had done.
John just stared at him blankly, the implications of Yami's admission taking a bit of time to truly sink in and hit him. He opened his mouth, then closed it, unsure what to truly say to this. Finally, with a weary sigh he ran a hand over his face and rubbed his eyes. "You lot were always like that weren't you? Always taking the initiative, always acting for what you perceive is my best interest, regardless of my thoughts or input, well except Braedon, he always tends to think too much before actually taking action." he mused, a phantom echo of resignation in his voice. "And it's not like I can actually do anything about it at this point right? What's done is done and that's all there really is to it." He said well shaking his head. "So, where do we go from here? What do we do now?" He asked knowing that crying over spilled milk—or, in this case, a fractured soul and an altered reality—would get them absolutely nowhere. The path forward was uncertain but it was the only one he could take.