As night passed, day came, and Oren eventually woke up from slumber.
His two golden eyes opened to the crimson sun beaming from outside his pristine balcony, casting red rays inside his room.
They were vibrant, mesmerising, and beautiful.
It astonished him how something so familiar as sunlight could be so elegant. Watching it for a while, he stayed in a passive state.
The feelings occupying his mind were nevertheless those of disgust and apathy towards himself.
It felt no different from waking up with an awful taste in his mouth, but this feeling was something he could not shake off, so he welcomed it into his mind.
He was not in the mood to argue with his feelings, nor hide them.
Memories and thoughts flooded his empty mind as words and terms such as Sunwane, trial, longing, humans, Enlightenment, and lastly, himself came to mind.
Oren exhaled slowly as emotions that felt impossible to feel earlier the previous day came rushing back, as though making up for the torment he had faced and the guilt he held close.
'The flame...' he mused.
'It brought me here, to this place called Everdream? So, this is my trial then...?'
The question had been plaguing his mind all night.
He stared down and sat up, but he did not bother to get out of bed. As usual, he remained in bed for a little while.
The only difference was that this wasn't what he usually did. That was what the Immortal Demon did.
A despicable terror, a plague, Oren exhaled slowly, resting his hand against his face before rubbing his eyes.
'Is the Immortal real, or did I conjure him from my mind? What even is the date today... no, how many days has it been since the trial started?'
He could not tell. The memories within were now those of his own. Previously, they had been something else. He had forgotten himself and his name.
'If the trial only lasts for seven days, and surpassing that time limit causes death, why do I have centuries of memories?'
Oren's true age was far more than just a few centuries, but what he remembered, those weren't the acts he committed... were they?
No, it couldn't be.
After a long while of thinking, Oren had come to a conclusion: that world was a lie.
It simply did not exist, and everything in it was fake.
Such wishful thinking may have been born out of some twisted false hope, but it was the only plausible reason for everything.
The world was fabricated to please him... 'but how would this help please me...?'
Or maybe, it was to please the trial.
It might have sounded insane to any other person, but the world he was in was not real. The trial was of the mind, and he was trapped in it.
Oren clutched his head.
'I'm still in the trial.'
That thought filled him with relief, for as soon as it came to his mind, something else loosened around him, making his eyes widen.
'No, why am I forgetting? Why are the memories of the trial fading? I don't want to remember, but without them, how will I escape?'
Yet it felt as though it were fading from his very grasp, slipping further away each time he tried to hold onto it.
The sudden rumbling of his stomach startled him. He had never felt that sensation before.
It was almost painful.
Because of it, Oren slowly got out of bed, remembering the Keeper, and that one of her many duties was to bring him breakfast.
So Oren made his way downstairs, trying to maintain his usual air of exaggerated flamboyance, hiding his disorientated self beneath the mask of the Immortal Demon.
There were only a few people in the manor besides those regulars he had met the other day, but they did not ask him to come over.
The regulars seemed to be in some agitation, whilst the Keeper kept her distance.
A group consisting of about six men and two women had left as he entered.
The remaining patrons looked at him with disdain, a vast change from what he had remembered of late.
Selvar's absence seemed to leave the place empty and soundless, despite him not being much of a talker from what Oren remembered.
For some reason, no one asked where he was, or where he had gone off to. No one wanted to interact with him.
'It is well past sunrise, anyways,' Oren thought to himself.
'I guess he found what he was looking for, and will not be coming back.'
He pondered for a moment.
'I need to leave Everdream as soon as possible.'
He sat within the manor, eating his meal as he stared intently at the people around him.
A shiver ran down his spine as he studied each face, one after another.
Unlike the previous night, there were no empty expressions or faded features.
They all smiled and laughed with one another.
All had eyes, mouths, noses, and every other feature he had come to know on a human face.
Yet Oren could not stop staring.
They looked normal.
And after what he had seen the previous night, that was what disturbed him the most.
After sitting awkwardly with his thoughts, Oren requested breakfast and eventually got some.
It should have been nice. It should have tasted delightful.
But he couldn't taste anything.
It was like he had no taste buds left to taste with.
The same was true of his other senses.
Originally, he would have been able to feel things, despite it being a trial of the mind, yet now there were so many things he could no longer feel.
He could feel the coldness of the air, but not the cushion beneath him as he sat at the table.
Only when everything started to unravel did he notice how flat the people around him seemed.
There were a few people in the downstairs area of the manor, the usuals.
He overheard them repeat themselves, change their tones for no good reason, and move mechanically, monotonously.
From what he remembered, it was similar to the person who was at the lake, whom he had scared that night.
And Selvar was still gone.
Selvar...
'That man, who is he really?'
That strange man had accompanied him here as part of their deal to create an Erol.
Oren's expression soured as he questioned what he recalled.
'What exactly is an Erol?'
He thought again, and knowledge he had never really learned was suddenly before him, as though someone had simply placed it inside his mind.
He doubted such creatures existed in the real world. He questioned if it was all a lie.
It seemed he knew how to create an Erol, yet he had forgotten much of what he knew about them.
About them and everything else.
But Selvar...
He knew that man well. He had gone away because the Immortal Demon had gone against his wishes.
'His wishes...?'
'By... by using what?'
A sickly taste grew in the back of his throat.
'Humans...?'
Oren inhaled slowly, deciding not to eat anymore. He slowly ascended the stairs and returned to his room.
He took a slow breath, then another, steadying himself.
But as he walked into his room, he could not help but notice something in the mirror above his desk, opposing the balcony, which revealed the lake beyond.
A smile caught the edge of his peripheral vision.
And he stopped.
He turned toward the mirror. Its polished surface was enclosed by a pristine white wooden frame.
For a moment, he simply stared at its corners, which were intricately carved, though the wood had faded with age.
As he faced the glass, a dull thud resounded in his chest.
His face was weathered, filled with scars and cuts, most old and some new, but nevertheless, they were marks of faded skin, which appeared in small clusters around his face, making his usual pale skin a dark grey.
His smile faded into a serene and austere expression, making Oren struggle to look at himself.
Gulping, he stared at his own ugly face, lowering his gaze to his bleak and gloomy eyebags, and then finally, to the grey roots in the depths of his slowly thinning hair.
Despite looking around twenty-five, small signs of the immortal's age remained clear.
But he was unfamiliar with that sight, and so Oren was entranced by what the mirror showed him, but also so utterly disgusted by what he saw in it.
No words could express his feelings, his repulsion, his anger, his hatred, all of which the Trial seemed determined to draw out of him.
He was terrified by what he saw in the mirror and wanted it to go away. But the visage and body of the immortal remained, looming within its depths.
He was a figure around Oren's height, lean and muscular, yet frail at the same time. His golden eyes, which had once shone with a brilliant gold, now held no lustre.
His gaze was empty and solemn, belonging to the body of an immortal, a demon who had committed countless atrocities, deeds that even he himself could no longer accept.
Oren's fingers tightened slightly, then loosened. His gaze dropped for a moment before he forced himself to look at himself.
'Why do I feel this way? I didn't do that. I didn't kill innocents. I did not kill the young and old, small and weak, or big and strong.'
'I did not do anything to anyone. That wasn't me! That was...'
Oren hesitated for a split second. He knew he wasn't the one to turn clear rivers into crimson baths of blood.
He understood that he had not sacrificed the lives of men and women alike. He wanted to think that, but he simply could not.
For he was that Immortal Demon.
The immortal was himself, and he could not simply hide behind a mask of apathy, as he would have when he was an Antherion.
With a hesitant step, Oren backed away from the mirror.
His breathing grew heavier as he traced the marks on his face. With the temptation to pull the mask of the wretched demon away, he thought.
'I shouldn't feel so much!'
But... he also could not easily look away from the face of the immortal. For the Immortal did what he did to save himself from the treachery of humans.
He killed not in cold brutality but in a vulnerable state.
At first, he was scared to kill, but those around him forced him into an entity that could kill heartlessly.
They were the reason he became a demon because they were the reason he wanted death, and that longing for death was his reason for finding the Erol of mortality and his reason for sacrificing human life.
Oren's body trembled as his hand fell from his face, and he watched the reflection in the mirror make that small movement.
But somehow, someway, the person in the mirror changed.
He now saw the face of his younger self, the entity he had once been, the Antherion.
He remembered little of the time before he entered the ruined realm, and even less of the land he had once called home.
In comparison to the Immortal Demon, he was a saint.
He was called one by the people, by the mortals in his old home. And he knew that this version of himself had loved humans.
They had been different back then.
He would not have dared to hurt another.
The mere thought of harming someone else would not even have crossed his mind.
It would have been an impure thought.
And yet that person was him.
The second was the face he saw now.
Oren, that was himself, the face he wished to have back, but it was out of his reach, and when he reached his hand out towards it, it returned to the terrible visage of the demon.
His chest tightened, his heart racing.
"Why am I seeing this again?"
His voice trembled, each breath growing heavier and heavier as he asked himself, 'Am I hallucinating...?'
Oren understood that people grow and develop, learn and change. That he today was different from who he had been yesterday.
Yet only those three faces stood out.
Three records of himself that were closest to him, but the Immortal Demon was nothing like Oren.
He lacked the same hesitation and morals, and it was as though he had been fighting a sin for so long that the sin had become himself.
But Oren could understand him at least.
He could not call him another person.
They were the same being...
Their thoughts, reasoning, and logic were similar. So was the way they understood certain things.
The only difference between them was everything that had happened between them in the past.
'The trial must have made me forget. It must have changed my perception.'
He had forgotten who he was, and what he thought was true had been changed. His past had been altered, transforming him into something else.
Those memories of centuries could not have been real.
They could not have happened within seven days.
But those fabricated experiences had shaped the immortal into something Oren struggled to recognise, yet the demon was not some entirely separate being.
He was Oren.
Or, perhaps more accurately, Oren was him.
That was what made it so difficult to accept.
And it was even harder to understand why he was in Everdream. He had never been there before.
Is that what it means to be human?
To long for something he had never known or wanted.
His eyes darkened.
'Something is wrong.'
Oren stared at his reflection.
'The trial.'
His thoughts stopped.
'It was the trial. All of it...'
It had been manipulating what he saw, remembered, and believed.
Maybe even the Immortal Demon was fake.
It was trying to make him believe that all he was seeing was real and, as he thought that, he heard something, like the hiss of a snake.
A sudden crack split through the room.
BANG!
An arrow had struck the mirror, shattering the glass.
Oren froze, then looked towards the balcony.
'Selvar?'
Before he could think, he smelled ash and smoke.