It was hard to say how many I had killed by the time I was done.  In my rage, my body had grown more monstrous, my limbs elongating unnaturally as if I had become a caricature of myself.  My claws had thickened and narrowed to dagger-like points.  I was taller, too—but hunched over, my spine bent unnaturally under the massive weight of my body.

It was not so different from when I had transformed the first time, infuriated by Ilmatar.  But it was so much more than that.  Now, in the confines of this memory, I possessed absolute control of every piece of my grotesque form.

I had just smashed the skull of an elf against the cobblestone beneath me.  Now my hands were stained in blood.  The elf had been the last of my attackers.  I’d found myself in a dingy alleyway, cornered by a group of five people—three humans and two elves.  They’d wielded torches, swords, and pikes.

Now they were all dead.  One of the elves had lost their arm, which lay on the other side of the alleyway, where it had fallen after I’d thrown it against the stonework wall.

I remembered it all—every slash of my claws, every leap into the fray or back out again, climbing the walls, even launching myself into the air with a determined flap of my wings.

I tried to recall what I had done before the battle, how I had transformed into my current frightening form.  I remembered tapping into some of the Void-touched energy within my soul, the dark fire at the heart of my Will, taking it into me, feeling anger at what the mob had intended.  My rage converted the Void energy into a dark, vital essence that flowed through my veins.  It had made me stronger and more brutal, transforming me into a purer expression of my monstrous nature.  I now understood it instinctively, as if I’d transformed myself hundreds of times, even thousands.

When I changed, I had also grown two large, leathery wings, each tipped by a claw.  As I’d first closed the distance with the mob, who had been surrounding a demon woman, some of them had turned at the sound of my approach, the crunch of my taloned feet in the gravel.

One of the humans had been carrying a crossbow, which he began to lift towards his eye, aiming at me, his face etched in fear as he shouted, “Behind us!”

His eyes were filled with anger, too, just as mine were.  But I flapped my wings once, as hard as I could, and launched myself into the air.  When he fired, the bolt missed me by the length of a fingernail, passing underneath me.  I was too heavy, I thought, for how far my wings had taken me.  But then I realized that there had thrummed a chronomantic incantation in my Will, a field projected around me that made me feel much lighter than usual.

This is it, I realized.  I can fly!  Or at least, I can make myself weigh less.

The only problem is—how did I do that?  It had felt as natural as breathing.  I hadn’t even needed to speak anything, only form the idea of being lighter, and visualize the combination of runes.

Visualize, I thought.  That was the key.  To see the spell rather than chant it.

Behind me, I heard crying and realized the woman I’d saved was staring at the mangled corpses of the people I’d killed while defending her.

She looked young, a green-skinned demon with alabaster horns who carried a baby in a sling at her chest.  She stared at me in what I could only assume was a strange mixture of awe and terror.

Even when I saved people, they were still frightened of me.  It was natural, in light of what I was.

It felt like I was living a story from the Book of Grievances, perhaps from one of the chapters I had skipped, yet another example from the long list of barbarism perpetrated against the Void-touched races that Greg-Theryx had forcibly rectified.

What city was I even in?  Not in Dreadthorn—these buildings were made of light gray stone, with dark green roofs that appeared to be made from clay.  Yellow streetlamps beckoned me back out of the alley into a large boulevard, but I didn’t go out there.  It was just after dusk, and the city was beginning to come alive with revelry.

I reached my hand out to the demon woman, and she took it, slowly rising to her feet.  But she didn’t look me in the eye.  She seemed to look everywhere else—the dirt, the sky, the walls—anywhere besides me and the dead.

“More will come,” I told her, and though it was me speaking, it wasn’t my voice.  It was so crisp and smooth, projected with the sure knowledge of a deity.  “You must leave this city.”

She stared into my eyes, clutching the child to her chest.  A boy, I realized, when he started to cry.

“I can’t…”  She shook her head.  “I have lived in these lands all my life.”

“I understand.  But it is safer in the West.”

A tingle on the back of my neck told me that I now had unwanted attention—a pair of dwarven men had decided the alleyway would be an excellent place to take a leak, only to be greeted by a scene of savage bloodshed.

I wondered if I could convince them that I had only been defending myself and the woman.  But as soon as I made eye contact with them, they saw me, a twisted nightmare covered in blood, and one of them screamed.  The other grabbed his friend by the arm and ran.

I liked dwarves the most of the so-called Blessed races.  By and large, the culture of dwarves was unpretentious, prone to festivity, with a deep love of craftsmanship in all things.  The fact I was even seeing them in the city meant there must be a Hold somewhere nearby, carved into the earth.  They generally only journeyed above ground for profit or adventure.  Otherwise, they preferred the cold darkness.

We had that in common.

Now that the dwarves had run screaming, others had their attention drawn to the alley.  I pulled at the woman’s hand, trying to convince her to leave, but she stayed rooted.  I could have forced her to come, dragged her out of here if necessary.  But I didn’t much care to.

“You came here to save us,” she said, and there was a note of reverence in her voice.  “Thank you.”

“I am only on this plane because I was cast out of the Aether by my family.  I know what it means to have no home.  There is no need for you to thank me.”

With a mere thought, I suppressed my Void aura, and my body reverted.  My claws shrunk into fingernails.  My horns halved in size.  My wings grew smaller, then merged back into me as if they’d never even been there.

My clothes, however, were shredded to ribbons.  Only fragments of them still hung from my body.

The woman smiled, perhaps less afraid of me now, and then, at last, she let me lead her running from the alleyway and down the city's streets.

The vision faded, and I was back in the darkness, standing on an illuminated path.

I went over everything in my head—how I had transformed, the movements I had made while fighting.  The experience washed over me, along with the horror of tearing a man’s throat out with my claws.  Of tearing that elf’s arm off like it was made from paper.

“So that’s what you wished to show me?” I said.

There’s more where that came from.  I chose it because the number of enemies is the same as you face now, is it not?

“I…  How did you know that?”

I can feel their Wills around you as surely as you can.

“Now, how do I wake up?”  I did feel like I’d learned something.  Transforming like that—I had done it by accident when Ilmatar had made me angry, but now I grasped the essential nature of it.  The way I needed to feel, the way my Will needed to assert itself upon the frail meat of my body.

If I did it as well as I had in the dream, it would make me much larger than the time I’d transformed before.  It would make me even larger than Shatterbone.  But I still didn’t know how much time had passed while I was trapped here, lost inside myself.  I knew I needed to get to Mona.  And I needed to bash Shatterbone’s head in.

You’re ready to go so soon?  You don’t want to see anything else?  You don’t wish to learn more about what you’re capable of?

“Someone is coming for me.  How long has it been?”

I can’t tell.  Time passes differently here.  It’s not linear.  Are you sure you’ve learned enough to protect yourself?  To protect our vessel?

The truth was that I wasn’t sure.  I could only hope, flimsy as that was, but I didn’t want to admit it.  And I didn’t want to experience more macabre visions of the Dark One’s past.  When I thought of how it had felt to squeeze a man’s skull till it had popped, I felt only a wave of residual anger.

If I were too slow to return, none of what Greg-Theryx could show me would matter.

“I need to fucking wake up!”

For the first time, I saw him, a vague shimmering outline in the darkness that vaguely resembled a demon’s silhouette.  Greg-Theryx had shown himself to me.  I felt him approach, twisting and flowing as if made from liquid darkness, patterns in the energy flowing through the tiny void within me.

Soon he was within a few inches of me, and I felt him leaning forward.  And then his throat, or the place it should have been, tore apart, a hole forming in the darkness as strands of shadow unraveled from a dark tapestry.

The hole in the darkness gained teeth, then eyes formed above its new mouth.  From its jagged maw came an otherworldly voice, a sound that seemed to echo throughout this place, resonating within my soul.

Go, then, mortal.  Save yourself if you can.  I know one surefire way to revive you.  If you’re sure?

“Just fucking do it,” I yelled.

So he screamed.

The voice pierced my soul, the loudest sound I had ever experienced, even though it wasn’t real, or perhaps because of that.

With a start, just like that, I was awake.  My mind buzzed as if it had been given a jolt.  My eyes were still closed, but the sensation of lying on the floor returned to me, my right cheek pressed against the cool stone as I lay on my stomach with my hands bound behind my back.

I reached out with my senses and felt Mona’s aura—she was still twenty or thirty seconds from arriving.  It had felt like hours, even days, since I had last been awake, but I’d barely been out at all.  Thanks to the Dark Lord’s scream, I had recovered in mere seconds.

Now that he had done me such a favor, I wondered what price he might exact down the road.  Assuming I lived beyond the next few minutes.

I took a deep breath and took stock of the other Wills around me.  Shatterbone’s aura towered above me, a dark red halo around a core of shadow, a tiny, perfect sphere like a miniature version of the Void itself.

I recognized that now.  It contained the Void energy trapped at the center of his being.  The core of one’s monstrous nature, begging to be let free.  Princess Nymphyra had possessed one as well, and so did Rhea Brightwind.  I remembered the way Rhea had transformed into a terrifying hound and how she had carved Lucifron’s arm.  If I managed to be half as frightening as her, I just might survive.

For the first time, I was thankful for the tower elevator’s lack of speed.  I had to act and create a distraction before Mona reached our floor.  Hesitantly, carefully, I allowed the air to flow back into my lungs.  I sensed their backs were turned away from me from how they were standing, but I tried to keep my chest from rising anyway.  I kept my breathing slow and shallow, in and out, a gentle rhythm as Shatterbone lingered a few strides away.

“Masterfully done, General,” one of the other Generals said, either Krez or Braz.  I could no longer be sure with my eyes closed.  Their Wills looked almost identical, and I’d lost track of them after being choked out. The two guards had returned to their positions by the doorway.

“In a way, I’m disappointed,” Ignak said. “Our so-called god was made of paper in the end. How pitiful.”

“If you’d been wrong about that, we’d all be dead now,” Phaedra said.

“He is still alive, right?” one of the Generals asked.

Shatterbone’s Will flared with a spark of annoyance at the question.  “Of course he is.  I wouldn’t kill such a valuable resource.”

Somehow, I wasn’t flattered by that description. I heard Shatterbone’s boots clang on the floor as he walked towards Phaedra’s mercurial spirit, which hovered off to the side. “Priestess Midnight, did you bring the collar?”

“Of course, General,” she said. “It’s outside in the hallway. I didn’t wish for the Dark Lord to see it prematurely.” Strange, I thought, that even after betraying me, she still called me Lord. Perhaps some habits were hard to break.

“Bring it here.”

“Yes, General,” she said, and her Will floated off.

Which was a problem.

“Someone’s coming,” Phaedra called back through the doors. “The elevator is approaching from below.”

“Good. They must have the High Priestess by now,” Ignak said.

My stomach twisted. From the moment I had felt her, I had assumed that Mona was coming here to save me. But perhaps I’d been wrong. I risked a deeper breath, then focused on the area around her aura. Were there others with her?

No. She was alone. Which meant Ignak was likely mistaken. And also meant that Mona would need backup when she arrived here.

Backup I would have to provide for her. I thought of what I had learned, of the dark knowledge I had mined from within my soul, and I hoped it would be enough.

And then, as I focused within myself on the dark seed I now knew lay at the center of my spirit, I opened my eyes and began to transform.  The more I contemplated my current situation, the more I realized all the things I had to be angry for, all of the many grievances I carried.

As I rose to my feet, I felt my transformation begin.  From a stately demon to pure dread—my horns extending, curving like sickles above my head, my arms and legs growing thicker with taut muscle.  As my wrists bulged, they shattered the frail bindings my captors had placed around them.

The energy of the void that dwelled at the center of my soul, a lingering stain from being dead, had fueled this transformation and would continue to fuel it for a short time.  What I hadn’t expected—what the Devourer’s dream hadn’t shown—was how much it hurt for your muscles to tear themselves apart before reassembling into a form of pure terror.

I expected my enemies to begin rushing towards me immediately, but I now gazed upon their backs as they all stood looking towards the elevator.  I felt Shatterbone’s Will burning with excitement.  As far as he knew, he’d already won and had done so easily.

It was time to disabuse him of that notion.

If I could.