Kael pressed his hand against his thigh and stared at the empty space ahead.
With the eye no longer weeping, the last of the water had already flowed downhill, disappearing into the darkness.
He lifted his shaking hand and straightened his fingers. For a moment he let them hover before his left eye, then he thrust them forward with all his strength, ready to gouge it out.
His eye twitched uncontrollably, then unraveled, shooting out tendrils as thin as hair.
The tendrils coiled softly around his aligned fingers, and all the momentum Kael had built up vanished in an instant, as if his hand had struck solid stone.
He let his muscles relax. The tendrils retracted into his eye, and his hand fell to the damp ground.
"It won't let me destroy it."
Kael stared into the distance, his expression somehow even emptier than before.
Even if he hadn't tried it, Kael knew. No, he felt it.
It didn't matter that the tendrils had lashed out to stop his hand, he would never have reached it anyway.
Every movement he made, every thought that flickered through his mind, felt wrong. Off. Like something beneath his skin was silently guiding him, turning him just enough to lose control without noticing.
If the tendrils hadn't stopped his hand, he would have stopped it himself. Not because he wanted to, but because something unseen whispered that he didn't want to. It didn't forbid him outright. It simply shaped the thought until it no longer belonged to him.
The idea of destroying the eye wasn't just difficult to imagine, it was impossible to keep in his mind. Each time he reached for it, the thought dissolved like breath in cold air, leaving only silence behind.
If not for the fact Kael had noticed blackouts. Moments where he knew he had thought something but couldn't remember it, he would never have noticed something messing with his thought pattern.
He turned his head and found a small puddle in the dirt where water had gathered. Crawling closer, he leaned over it.
His face was streaked with drying blood, the crusted trails running down from his left eye. He lowered himself until his reflection rippled in the shallow water.
The right eye was still his own, sharp and green. The other was something else entirely. The original eye was gone, torn out and replaced by the weeping one. What stared back from the puddle looked nothing human.
The iris shimmered like molten gold, alive and shifting, as if it were catching firelight that wasn't there. The rest of the eyeball was pitch black, polished like obsidian. Thin veins of the same gold branched through it, spidering across the surface in irregular patterns. Each one pulsed faintly, almost like it was breathing.
Kael watched it move in the reflection, and for a moment he couldn't tell if it was part of him or if he was part of it.
His fingers were only moments away from pulling his eyelids open for a closer look when the eye pulsed once.
The shock ran through his skull like a heartbeat that wasn't his own. The thought of touching it, of even trying, suddenly felt strange and far away. Then came the pain.
The eye unraveled again, spreading its tendrils.
They shot out from the black surface, slicing through his upper eyelid before curling midair and stabbing down through the lower one.
"Agh!"
Kael's hand shot up on instinct, but it stopped halfway. His arm refused to move any further. The tendrils worked with a will of their own, tearing through flesh as easily as thread through wet cloth.
New cuts opened across his face, bright lines of blood running down his cheek and dripping from his chin. The tendrils didn't hesitate. They entered and exited again and again, sewing patterns that only they could understand.
At last they paused. For a single moment, there was stillness. Then they turned inward, vanishing beneath the skin.
Kael's eyelid slammed shut, sealing the eye beneath it. The tendrils tightened from within, pulling flesh to flesh until there was nothing left open.
It had sewn his eye shut.
Kael collapsed forward and clutched at his face, fingers digging into his skin.
"Bastard."
He wiped his bloodied mouth against his shoulder, pushed himself upright, and staggered toward a nearby tree. He slid down to the base and let his body rest against the trunk.
Closing his remaining eye, he split his consciousness. The world around him dimmed, and the familiar silence of his inner realm took hold.
The moment the colossal red river of Will came into view, Kael's breath caught. He dropped to his knees, eyes fixed on the current that represented his own being.
"Ahah…"
It began as a weak chuckle, a sound half born of pain, half disbelief. Then it grew louder, cracking, ragged, almost manic.
He tilted his head back and laughed until the sound broke apart in his throat.
"You've done it now, Kael," he muttered between gasps.
When he finally looked back at the river, his laughter died in his mouth.
What had once been a clean, beautiful crimson flow now churned with corruption. Countless golden-white tendrils writhed beneath the surface, weaving through the current like living veins of infection. They reached out and coiled around drifting silver specks, his Thoughts, dragging some along the current while others fought against it.
He stared at his Will for a while, mind drifting somewhere far away. The sound of rhythmic thuds eventually drew him back, echoing through the open space.
When he glanced down, his eyes found Point Aegis's mote once again, rolling confidently across the void.
He lifted his foot, ready to kick it into the river, but stopped halfway. After a long moment, Kael sighed and pulled his consciousness back.
As the red river faded, the world of the cave returned. Without the light from the flow, the darkness deepened, settling thick around him.
His gaze moved across the countless tree crowns above, each faintly glowing in the dark.
'Guess they're glowing because they drank from the river,' he thought. 'Didn't even notice it before, with how bright the river was.'
Kael stood and looked down at his thigh. The wound there had almost closed completely.
He wiped at his face, watching blood drip from his chin onto the dirt. A small, dry laugh escaped him.
'Since I can't do anything about the eye, I'll just have to do what I really came here for.'
He drew in a slow breath and started walking toward the building.
Moving carefully, he stepped through each room, collecting anything unfamiliar and tossing it into the Stone Coffin mote. Dust drifted through the air, stirring faintly with every movement.
Only when the place was nearly stripped bare did he stop. His eyes lingered on the bed in the corner.
'Should I take a nap?' he wondered, feeling the weight of sleepless nights and too many battles pressing against his shoulders.
'Nah.'
He turned away and left the room. He walked until the ground began to rise, and the edge of the cliff came into view, the place where the waterfall had once fallen.
Stopping at the brink he looked down. The forest stretched endlessly below, a sea of dark crowns fading into the distance.
Kael reached a hand into the open air beyond the edge.
For a few long seconds, he held it there, feeling nothing. Then he drew it back and nodded slightly to himself.
'At least I'm right about this…'
He snapped his fingers, and the golden rod responded, carrying him over the edge and down along the sheer drop.
Glowing puddles dotted the cliffside where the luminous water had once gathered between the rocks.
It had started as nothing more than a theory, but after tracing the flow of the river back to its source, Kael had begun to connect the pieces. Now he was almost certain, the weeping eye wasn't just the source of the water. It was the thing behind the pull itself, the gravity that had been dragging everything downward since the beginning.
Dismissing the mote, Kael followed the dried river deeper into the hollow mountain.
'Now… where are you?'