Once the voices started, I had no way to check the passage of time. I was pulled into an empty black void within my own head, and time blurred into one long monotonous slog as I was barraged by accusations from a number of people both dead and alive.
Anyone I know is dead isn't going to get under my skin. It's just like Drache's trap back in Algrustos. I can only be hurt by it if I let it get to me, if I forget that none of this is real. But the voices of the people who are still alive are harder to deal with. It hits too close to home.
The psychic assault began with the pins and needles, like pinpricks at the corner of the mind. They were fingers looking for cracks so that the Encroacher's vile influence could seep into my brain. I knew they'd look for my insecurities first. Demons were all too quick to do the same, and I'd had rudimentary training and perhaps a little too much hands-on experience with dealing with it during my mercenary career. So when Farnus's voice surfaced in the recesses of my mind, I was ready.
"There you are. Still doing everything by the seat of your pants. Perhaps if you were a better mage, you'd have an easier time of things. Maybe you never deserved to come to my school at all." Farnus' face loomed out of the fading memories of a classroom in a dilapidated building, standing behind a desk littered with tomes and other magical accessories. He wore an expression of disappointment, his eyes judging me from beneath his bushy grey eyebrows.
He opened one of the books on the desk, smoothing out the page with a wrinkled hand. "How many people are dead because you weren't good enough. Weren't smart enough. But you don't even care about that. You're dead on the inside, and you were that way long before I plucked you out of that orphanage, Kuro." The page showed the old orphanage from my childhood, but the dimensions were distorted, almost as if I were viewing the alternate version of it from Drache's nightmarish vision.
"Keep talking, old man. Even if you had any skill in necromancy you wouldn't come back from the grave just to make me feel bad." The vision threatened to suck me in, putting me in a chair right in front of the desk. I glared back at the false face of my teacher in defiance. "And that's a lie, too. If I were dead inside do you think I would've bothered to toss some kid through the air for chucking rocks at an animal? You don't know shit, Burundus. Get out of my head."
When Farnus smiled at me, the length of his mouth went well beyond the edges of his face, turning it into a freakish caricature that nearly made me jump out of my skin. His teeth were like jagged rocks jutting out of a sea, coated in familiar blue slime. The skin on his face started to melt like candle wax, and his voice came out distorted until it became unrecognizable. "If I can't get through this way, I'll find another. The voices in your head will tell me how."
The classroom melted away and became an endless black void. Above me was a tree, one that made the blood in my veins freeze. Behind me, an open grave yawned, its edges distorted by the haziness of the magic used to mess with my mind. At the bottom of the grave lay Laura, half covered in dirt, the gaping wound in her chest still bleeding, but blue slime was leaking from the hole. She looked at me with hollow, accusatory eyes.
"It should be you in this grave, not me." Her voice sounded hoarse, as though her vocal chords were rotting away in her throat. "I had so much more to live for than you. I had a family. I had a future. I was going to tell Alverd how I felt about him. And I threw it all away to save you." Her arm lifted out of the dirt, the sleeve falling away to reveal bones clean of flesh. Her bony finger pointed at me. "I gave up everything. What have you done to make my sacrifice worth it?" My teeth bit down on my tongue, fighting back my urge to respond at first. I know it's not her. This is just my fears again. It might as well just be me in that grave saying it to myself. It's not her. I moved to the edge of the grave, kneeling down beside it. I wonder that myself some days.
I flicked my finger, disregarding the non-existent rules of magic in this unreal space to create a tiny marble of flame. "Hell if I know. I'm not the one who gets to decide, though. Laura does. I'll never know if I'm gonna live up to her expectations, but that's not for me to know. So stop trying to screw with me. I don't owe you anything, Burundus." With that, I let the glowing red marble roll off the tip of my finger into the grave and Laura caught fire. In seconds, her screams faded into the burbling angry cries of the Encroacher.
The tree melted down into the ground in a cascade of slime leaving me in the featureless void again. Spreading my arms wide, I yelled out to Burundus. "What else do you have? You're gonna have to try harder than that! This is lazy! I dealt with this shit ages ago! Do better, you overgrown drain clog!" Bravado ignited like fire in my veins, making me high off my false sense of security. "Do your worst! I dare you! I'm right here!"
Two blobs of blue slime surged out of the ground in front of me, and something huge loomed up behind me. Turning my head, the orphanage from my childhood stood tall, reaching far higher into the sky than it should've. At my feet was a baby in a bundle of cloth, swaddled so much that I couldn't even see it. The blobs didn't even take on human form, simply hovered over the baby like vultures. "We never wanted you. We left you because you were a burden. We always knew you'd be." Their voices didn't even sound human; they were hissing sounds that only managed to pass for speech.
I actually barked out laughing. "This?! This is the best you can do? I don't even know who my parents were! I never saw their faces! I tell you to bring it and this is all you can conjure up? You think this scares me?" Waving my hand, I let loose a burst of lightning that scythed out, slicing both of the blobs in half. They melted back into nothingness, and I turned and set the orphanage ablaze.
Stamping my foot, still carried by my growing sense of invulnerability, I yelled at the top of my lungs some more. "Come on! You're a centuries old demi-god with demonic powers from another universe! Surely you can get the better of a third rate magic school wash out! I'm right here! Come get me!" I held up the Staff of Farewells and ejected a stream of white hot flame out of its ruby tip, again defying the laws of magic that seemingly did not apply. "Come on! I'm waiting! COME GET ME!"
A reverberating roar echoed through the emptiness pounding my eardrums and rattling my bones as it washed over me. Hundreds of incoherent voices railed against me, pummeling my brain like a hailstorm. I was not moved. I planted my feet and waved the Staff indiscriminately, blasting out more fire even as I choked on my response. "Fuck you! Some wizard king you are! If this is all you have then you deserve what you got!"
Slime rose up in the distance, a tidal wave that dwarfed me and was still growing by the second. It surged towards me with incredible speed, but when it reached me there was no force or pressure. Instead, it passed over me. Engulfed in a current of slime, I squeezed my eyes shut, the voices rising to a deafening din that made my head feel like it was about to split in two.
I wasn't sure how long I stood braced against the wave, but eventually the voices subsided. I took a chance and opened one eye. The void was now full of stones, structures, and vegetation. It almost resembled a Kierhaian garden, complete with a little red bridge over a small river and streamers of charm paper hanging from red spirit gates. A narrow stone walkway stretched under and past a procession of the red gates, the charm papers dangling and twisting gently in a breeze I didn't feel on my skin. Somewhere past the first gate, I heard the sound of a little girl crying.
You should know better than to go forward. You're smart enough to know this has to be some kind of trap. Don't fall for it. Despite the nagging of my common sense voice, I took a step towards the gate. One step became another, and soon I was walking briskly through the gates, my staff pointed ahead of me. Aw, hell. The only way out is through. The problem with mind games is that by the time you know you're being suckered into one, it's too late to turn back. Still, since Burundus was having that much trouble breaking me, I was confident I could handle whatever he threw at me next.
After passing the fourth gate, something changed. Instead of charm paper with Kierhaian prayer sutras, banners depicting golden dragons in flight hung from the gates further on. The uniform stone of the path became a decadent paved street. Piles of books teaching the rudimentary basics of magic and its many schools appeared on and next to the street, and I swore that one book sitting atop one pile had a tear across its cover exactly the same as the one I'd used in magic school as a child.
What's going on? Is this some new trick? Well, whatever it is, Burundus hasn't gotten to me yet. He must be really grasping at straws by now. A gust of wind came down the path, out of the nothingness past the rows and rows of gates, and it brought a fresh wave of new voices. But when they came close enough to hear, they weren't what I expected.
"What did I ever do to deserve you." A voice, unmistakably feminine and filled with loathing was the first to reach my ears. "In a thousand years I could never commit so great a crime that I should be saddled with such a disgrace as you. I should've known you would grow to be such an abject failure." The sheer force of the hate behind that voice made me stumble, and I had to reach out my hand to lean against the pole of the nearest red gate to steady myself. Wait. Isn't that Evros' voice? From the visions Drache gave me. It sounds a little younger, but there's no mistaking it. Maybe it's from one of her memories. But why am I hearing Evros' voice?
Another voice hit me while I was still recovering from the last one. This one was that of a man, likely middle aged by the gruffness in it, and just as full of resentment. "Have you no pride in yourself? Don't you have any idea of how hard I worked to arrange for you to even try to hold that position? Do you not appreciate how hard your sister and I work to take care of you when you do nothing to earn such grace from us?" The voice was completely unfamiliar to me, and it vanished almost as quickly as it came.
A third voice rose out of the gloom and wormed its way into my head. A woman, young by the sound of it, but the most noticeable quality was the haughtiness in her tone, arrogance bordering on sadism. "Oh sister, what's that you have there? A doll? Give it here. So adorable! It's a mage, isn't it? You don't need this. Dreams are for those who deserve them. Someone like you could never understand. Stop pretending like there's someone out there waiting for you. You'd just let them down, just like everyone else around here."
Before I could even guess as to who the girl was, the crying stopped. I froze, my instincts going on full alert. A second later, a blue fireball streaked down the pathway towards me. I had maybe a second to wonder if the fireball was real or not when muscle memory took over for me, my arms tracing the circular motion of a shielding spell. The fireball impacted the curved lens of the shield, but even with it up the heat felt real, dispelling my doubts. So I do have to be careful about what's real or not here.
"Shut up! Shut up! I don't want to hear it anymore! Leave me alone!" Deotra's voice came from further down the path. Although her voice sounded angry, there was a detectable current of fear underneath it. Sensing she was in danger, I hurried through the gates, ignoring the inconsistencies in the scenery that were multiplying by the second. After passing one final gate, I emerged into a courtyard that was yet another mishmash of things that were out of place.
The general layout of the courtyard was similar to shrines I'd seen in Blossom City and Standing Stone. Tiny buildings made of red wood resembling miniature houses containing polished stones carved with protective sutras sat haphazardly with no sense to their placement. A cherry blossom tree planted in a corner showed signs of magical scorching along its bark, the wood still smoldering from a recent exposure to fire. In the center of the courtyard lay Deotra, on her side with her hands covering her face. Before her lay one of the stones, except it had been split down the middle almost perfectly.
My first instinct was to run to her, but alarm bells went off in my head. Wait. Maybe Burundus is playing some kind of trick. Maybe his first attempts were obvious to put me off my guard. Deotra was facing toward me, but I couldn't see her face because of her hands; her body rocked with her sobs, and she was curled into a semi-fetal position with her tail curled around her legs.
Approaching cautiously, I took a few tentative steps towards her. "Deotra? Can you hear me?" Her hands moved away from her face, and I saw she had shining trails running down from her eyes. "I'm here. It's me." I knelt down next to her, keeping the hand on the opposite of my body still firmly on my staff. Gently I put my left hand on her cheek, and although her first reaction was to flinch, I stroked her face softly. "I'm real. Let me help you."
She let out a choked hiccup, then slowly sat up. "Oh gods, it's really you!" I embraced her, any remaining suspicious discarded. She folded her arms around me and cried into my shoulder. "I tried not to listen to him. It was easy at first. But then I started hearing voices I didn't recognize, and then… then…"
"Deotra, who were they?" I looked into her eyes. "There was a man and a young woman. The things they said were egregious. They weren't talking to you, were they?"
She averted her eyes. "My father. My older sister. They used to say horrible things like that all the time. Fox familiars spend all their time lazing about or preparing to integrate into society as a mage's familiar, and that means we often imitate societies in our communes so we understand what it's like to live among our contractors." She sniffled, wiping away her tears on her sleeve. "After my mother disappeared, my father and sister became different people. It was like a veil was lifted, and they showed me how truly ugly they were on the inside."
The admission caught me by surprise. It wasn't like Deotra to be so candid and forthcoming about her past, nor had I expected her to be so up front about it now. Tempted as I am to know more, we're still in danger. I gave her a light shake. "Can you stand? We should find Drache. Maybe she can figure out how to get us out of this." She hesitated, but then found her feet. As she stood up, the air around us heated up until it hurt to breathe.
Blue fire sprung up on all sides, encircling us but not coming so close as for us to be worried just yet. The flames ran along the ground, catching on the shrines and the tree until everything around us was ablaze. Pulling Deotra behind me, I held up my staff in anticipation of some kind of attack, but the fire didn't come closer. Instead, a chorus of voices originating from outside the circle assaulted us like an angry flock of crows.
There was so much overlap between the voices that I couldn't tell what they were saying. While the voices shared the same furious tone, they had different pitch and intonations, meaning that they didn't all belong to the same person. Behind me, Deotra pressed herself against my back and gripped her arms around my torso, and even over the voices I could hear her make a gut-wrenching whining sound like a terrified child.
If this was his game, trying to hurt Deotra to get to me, he's gonna find out real quick how badly that'll backfire on him. Sweeping the Staff of Farewell in a grandiose arc ahead of me, I decided that I was done playing his game. Let's see what happens when the Staff of Farewells enters the equation. Now you're gonna play by my rules.
The ruby gave off a flash of crimson light, and immediately the psychic pressure ever present at the edge of my perception vanished. Here in this tiny space, even if it's only a patch of land in the middle of a raging fire surrounded by a dark ocean, I am king. This is MY rock. MY place. MY will. And you will recognize it, or I will turn you to ash! See me and tremble!
Blue fox fire came to the Staff, retreating from the shrines and tree, infusing my weapon with will and power. In this space, the rules of magic applied, the laws of reality were stone and I was in charge. Icky black shadows seeped from the scenery, proof of Burundus' power waning in my presence. His simulated nightmare was coming apart like paint peeling off an abandoned house, and he and I both knew it.
The way the shadows crept down almost made it look like everything was bleeding. Nevertheless, I brandished my orb of fox fire, daring an enemy to come forth and face me. In the illumination of the blazing blue ball, movement caught my eye. Amorphous blobs were congregating a fair distance away, studying us where the heat couldn't touch them.
Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but many of the blobs had faces that looked humanoid except for grotesquely distorted features, such as lopsided mouths or misshapen eyes. Maybe Burundus can't focus on just one of us at a time. Since Drache, Deotra and I are all together, his attacks can't discriminate between us. I know I heard Evros back there, so it stands to reason that if I heard someone from Deotra's life they must also be experiencing my past, too.
It was risky, but I reached out with the bond I'd established with Deotra to try and locate Drache. Somewhere off in the darkness, a pinprick of golden flame locked onto me, like a ship seeing a lighthouse through a torrential rainstorm. The golden flame shot towards me, and in the far distance beyond the blobs a tiny twinkle of light told me that Drache was on her way. "Be brave, Deotra. Drache will be here soon." I reached behind me and pulled my shivering familiar to my chest, my staff still pointed ahead. "Stay with me. I can't be brave without you."
My words should've been reassuring, but instead she clung to my body keeping her face hidden in the front of my robe. "No, no, no. Father is here. He's already angry with me. I need to hide. He won't find me if I do. But Daelana will. She always does. She was always more clever than him." She was hyperventilating, panic seeping into her voice. "Clever like Mother. Smarter than I could ever hope to be. She always finds me. Always." She broke into a sob, and I slipped my arm tighter around her.
The blobs, perhaps sensing Deotra's distress, absorbed each other to become a larger, more solid mass. It took the shape of a tall man, features gaining substance as the blobs built its form literally from the ground up. Legs became covered by a sandy yellow robe similar to the common dress of Kierhai, loose-fitting with wide sleeves. The torso was not broad or skinny, the shoulders of average width, the head not too long or wide. Dripping slime turned into dirty blonde hair, short and only slightly curly. Next to appear were a long fox tail and two pointed ears.
His face was not at all what I would've imagined: stern but far younger than I would've guessed, an absence of wrinkles or laughter lines made him look like he was barely into his thirties, and clear golden eyes very much like Deotra's. His cheekbones were not pronounced but were enough to give the lower half of his face a triangular shape with a gently pointed chin. The lips were thin and already turned down in a scowl. Unlike Deotra, his skin was a few shades darker than hers, as if he'd spent ample time basking in the sunlight.
Behind him, another nightmare was taking shape. This one wasn't as tall as the man, but far curvier; even as the slime slid upward it spread outward to accommodate shapely thighs and sloping hips. Her torso did a sharp zigzag as it slimmed her waist only to plump out again for a chest that easily rivaled Deotra's before ending in a delicate neck and immaculate set of collarbones. The outfit that morphed into being was the very opposite of modest, with a neckline so deep that it had to have been a choice, tied with a bright red sash around a pink robe that ended somewhere just above her ankles, and her feet were clad in snow white socks in simple sandals.
"Smug" and "haughty" were not capable of describing the look of supreme arrogance on the young woman's face. One look was enough for me to hate her; I'd seen similar looks in men and women alike, always at my expense. A cascade of glossy, wavy blonde hair flowed down both sides of her head, framing her face and just managing to obscure one of her amber eyes on the right side before flowing down past her breasts to end at her waist. She gave me a wink and smiled at me wickedly, and her pearly teeth were sharp and neat like that of a shark.
"Oooooh! What's this?" Even though it was just a projection of Deotra's fear, the sound of her sister's voice made her burrow into me even harder. "Did little Deotra find herself a mage? Such a cute little thing! I want to pinch his cheeks! How precious." She leaned forward, but I was too busy watching the way her teeth gnashed in her mouth to notice anything else. "What did she do to get you to be hers? Surely she didn't win you over with her skills or charm. She's never been good for anything. Ask her. She'll be the first to admit it."
"Shut your mouth, harlot," I snapped back at her. "Anyone who wants to talk about someone else's lack of charm better not come to that argument dressed like a whore or they're getting laughed out of the room. Come back after you're finished dressing." I growled at her, baring my own teeth in a purely animalistic display.
"Tsk, tsk. Such a vile mouth on such a cute boy. How dare you say such things to a lady." Her smile grew wider, making her look even more bloodthirsty.
"Don't play with fire unless you're ready to get burned. And next time, you want me to treat you like a lady, act like one. I've got no problem smack talking a bitch." I pointed the staff at her and for just a moment, she flinched. "Or setting her on fire, for that matter."
Retreating behind the apparition of her father, Daelana stuck her tongue out at me from safety. I shifted my aim to him instead. "What about you, daddy dearest? You wanna make something of it? I'm uncouth, I'm dirty, I've got no respect for authority and even less respect for shit parents. So step forward only if you're ready to see what a bad influence I am on your daughter." The soft whimpering of my familiar made all the fear flee my body. I was ready to burn Burundus' entire illusion to the ground if I needed to.
The comet that was Drache was coming, the twinkle becoming a flare. She was still far, far away, too far to help us. Whatever I was going to do, I was gonna have to do it long enough to keep Deotra's worst fears at bay until Drache could rescue us. While I was trying to figure out the how, the ball of blue fox fire jumped off the end of my staff and flew over to the outstretched hand of Deotra's father.
He caught it with ease, then squelched it in his hand like a bug. The fire snuffed out instantly, and neither his skin nor his clothes seemed worse for wear. Reflexively I took a step back, not realizing that such an action was an admission of weakness. He advanced, and I felt my heart plummet into my stomach as his grim face came closer and closer.
"This is what happens when children aren't taught proper discipline growing up." His voice was so utterly cold and lifeless, like ice coating the skin of a corpse. He opened his arms and six balls of blue fire flared into being above him, bathing me in baleful ghostly light. I planted my feet, but I could barely see with all the light burning my eyes.
"No time like the present to start."