When Mona had escaped from her bubble, I was almost drained. I’d watched helplessly from behind fogged glass at what transpired.  When I tried to transform, I felt a pounding in my head, and collapsed.

After I was taken back to my chamber, I passed out from exhaustion, only to return to my nightmare.  This time I awoke at the steps to the museum, but when I floated to the central hall, the exhibit hall was still trashed, just like Theryx had left it.

I felt his presence, as if he wished to speak with me, though I wondered if he wished to mock me, or if he had something more sinister planned. I tried to focus on his presence, hoping I would be able to tell where he was even before he revealed himself to me, and I felt him lingering in the exhibit hall he had broken.  Strangely, I felt like cracks had formed in the walls and floor of that place.  Cracks which released an eerie light.  Light that was flowing into where Theryx’s shadowy presence resided.

Almost as if he were feeding on it.

“Well, I’m back,” I thought. “I can tell you have something to say.”

As polite as ever, I see.

“I’ve lost whatever patience I had. Things aren’t going well outside.” Already I was considering the Void portal that led back towards consciousness. But what could I achieve, even if I woke up now?  My energy was completely tapped out.

A feeling of hopelessness washed over me. I hadn’t been able to help her. I’d pounded uselessly at the glass with my fists, had even cracked it, which I thought was a good thing until Phaedra’s foam started to seep through.

It bothered me that Theryx appeared to be absorbing energy from the exhibit hall he had damaged.  That couldn’t be good.  He had tried to devour me before, of course.  Was this his way of trying to finish the job?

I thought of accusing him directly. After all, I could hardly be on worse terms with the so-called Dark One than I already was. I floated towards him, observing the flickering light emanating from the fissures more closely.

What do you want, mortal?

“You could start by not huffing my soul, or whatever it is you’re doing over here.”

It’s not… I see we have gotten off on the wrong foot. But you must understand, my essence is already pitifully drained after what you have done to me.

“I haven’t done anything to you.”

Laughter boomed. My, you are bold. You’ve taken everything from me. Do you understand that, or are you an idiot?

“That wasn’t my fault, or my plan. And I have bigger problems than you, anyway.”

Ah, having some organizational issues? That tends to happen when one’s followers realize they are led by an incompetent fool. Demons are an unruly and violent people, by the Void’s making. In a way, it is to their credit. Humanity are amateurs at disposing of their overlords, by comparison.

I wasn’t sure that was a compliment, but I chose to take it in the spirit with which it was intended. “And I suppose you’re offering to help me with those organizational issues? I think I understand your deal—the nightmares, the slow merging of your memories and personality into mine as my soul is devoured—and I want no part of it. If I could stop you sucking on that weird broken part of my soul, I would.”

You would kill me, then? When I said you had drained me, I meant it. If I do not devour, I will die of hunger. Like all beings.

“So even gods need to eat, huh?”

We… We are hardly the gods we claim to be. But I expect you will learn that more fully in time.

It wasn’t the answer I’d expected—a rare sign of humility. “Well, I still need to figure out how to work this.” If I’d possessed hands, I would have gestured at the building around us. Why had Theryx been able to make it show me those memories of fighting, of my fully demon form? Meanwhile, I was trapped here, unable to do anything but gawk at the worst museum exhibits I’d ever seen.

But if I could have used this place to train, to learn…

Perhaps I could help…

“Sure, and then you get to eat a little more? You give me another memory, show me another vision to traumatize me with? I’m tired of your shit. The High Priestess is being taken back to the dungeon as we speak, and I…”

You are so disheartened because of a woman? Pathetic.

I didn’t respond, only felt myself seethe. Anger felt different without a body. I felt no pounding heart or pumping blood, but a cold rage washed over me, a desire to make this sad god suffer.

And a thought occurred to me—I had no voice in this place, and could not speak any incantations. I had tried to conjure a flame before, without even a hint of success. But as I’d learned in the final pages of Gravity and Time, there was another way to form a spell. A way that did not rely on speaking.

I focused on Greg-Theryx’s ghostly presence, and imagined a rune being etched into reality upon him. In the Old Tongue the rune stood for banishment, or expulsion, which in my head literally translated to the words, “Go away.”

What are you doing, mortal? I feel—Stop that.

The rune felt slippery in my mind, as if there was some resistance on the part of reality.  I couldn’t quite focus on it clearly. The jagged lines trembled, refusing to form.

Be careful with such magics, my friend, for they can be dangerous and should not be experimented with.

But I had long ago stopped paying attention to his advice. I marshaled every ounce of my energy, pushing it forward in my mind, forcing the rune to grow more coherent. Now I imagined the rune in bright white and glowing font, burning in the darkness within my soul. As I carved it in front of Greg-Theryx with the pressure of my Will, slowly and carefully, I felt a resonance.

The rune filled my vision, copying itself, blurring in my awareness as if it were about to explode into pure light. It felt similar, in a way, as the chorus of voices that I felt when reciting a vocal incantation. As I finished the final swish of the rune, I realized I had done it. Beyond a certain point, reality had stopped fighting against me, and my working could no longer be prevented, only carried out.

Please, you’ve made your point, mortal. I won’t—

Greg-Theryx’s thought suddenly terminated, as if he had never been here at all. I looked around in the ruins of the Hall of Dread and felt nothing. No fear. Nothing was watching me now. Nothing consumed the stray energy from my soul. At long last, I found myself alone, in perfect solitude, in this most dismal temple.

I couldn’t quite believe it, but my single-rune, improvised sorcery had worked. I’d cast an actual spell here, or perhaps merely issued a command, and my Will had seen it done. I’d rid myself of an annoying pest, at least for now. Part of me wondered if I might see him again soon—it felt too easy to just wink a god out of existence like that.

But for now, at least, I felt a sense of peace. There was no one here to bother me.  No one besides my self, and my self-pity.

Carefully, tentatively, I floated back into the central chamber of the museum and cast my awareness upward, to the domed glass ceiling that looked upon a dark sky.

I tried to visualize a single rune at first: “Hello.”

There was no resistance this time, no force of Will required to write the symbol. The rune burned, buzzed as if containing countless echoes of itself, then faded after a moment. But nothing happened.

So this space wasn’t alive. It wouldn’t talk back to me.

But there was another rune in the Old Tongue that came to mind, and I drew it in the air above me instead:

“Light.”

This one was a little harder. I felt my focus waver for a moment as I drew a circle above a twisted line, the rune for light resembling a torch or perhaps a bonfire. The rune blazed in a moment of pure incandescence before dissolving. I looked around, waiting for something to happen, wondering if perhaps this had also failed.

But a moment later, just as I gave up, a dim, pure light burst forth in the sky above, shining down through the ceiling.  Eager to see what I had done, I walked towards the front of the museum, and exited out onto the steps.

I hadn’t known there even was a horizon here, but apparently this space did curve, or perhaps have a finite edge, because the sky now glowed with a dim light in all directions, but the ground was still black. There were no clouds, only an overcast gray that blanketed the sky in every direction. Though it wasn’t as bright as daylight, it was a relief compared to the eternal night I’d been trapped in.

And more importantly, it was another small victory—I’d exerted some degree of control over this world, no matter how small. It was time to try something more complicated.

I looked above me and stared at what I could now only think of as a blank gray canvas, the medium upon which I would inscribe my desires.  I searched my memory, trying to remember the final pages of Gravity and Time. I imagined holding the book in my hands, trying to filter through my fragments of knowledge, all those quickly-flipped pages.  I remembered coming to the sad conclusion that if it was going to take me years to learn to fly, I probably never would.

There were components of the visual incantation, dozens of runes I barely remembered, that were linked to the direction of flight. There were others that depended on your location relative to the Void and the gate to so-called Heaven, through some complicated equation I could only half-remember. These changed the part of the incantation that described the amount of force to apply in the specified direction, which then impacted another part of the incantation that was supposed to account for the air pressure and relative humidity in the area. It seemed almost impossible to me, with my current level of knowledge, to disentangle these different pieces of the incantation even in theory, let alone to ever be able to use them in real-life. Even in my perfectly controlled soul-space, it would be difficult.

I would need to painstakingly work through every detail to produce a working spell. A spell that would no longer be correct by the time I finished making it.

Despite the task before me, I still scribbled runes into the gray sky absentmindedly, trying to sketch out the pieces of the spell I did understand—a few runes in the top left, and near the center of the grid. The parts of the spell that focused on the gravity of the world itself, pulling me down. In my mind the runes lingered after I wrote them, as if my Will knew they weren’t a complete spell yet. They waited patiently as I continued, trying to think of a way to somehow achieve the impossible task I had set for myself. I needed to do something. I couldn’t accept the powerless feeling that had started to overtake me before I kicked Theryx out.

Even if I failed in the end, I needed to try.

As I stared into the soup of runes above me, I realized I’d already made some mistakes. If I actually finished this spell it might smash me into the ground, or fling me at hundreds of miles per hour into the sky, and I had no idea which. My writing flickered with uncertainty, the runes beginning to at last dissolve, as if the magic itself was unsure what I intended.

But as I watched the half-spell vanish, my hopes fading sadly into the gloom, an idea occurred to me. If I could have laughed down here, I would have. I’d been so focused on trying to do the impossible, so stubbornly focused on my objective, I’d neglected the alternative.

If I couldn’t fly, I would learn the next best thing.

And that would have to be enough.

 

---

 

It became easier to make progress once I’d simplified the problem, and at last I came to a solution for one of my two big obstacles. Many of the runes became the same, and through some experimentation, I realized that certain sections of the spell could be left blank, as they were no longer needed.

It only took what felt like ten or perhaps a hundred more hours, the flow of time in that place somehow both fast and slow at once. In the end, almost half my time was spent in confusion wondering why my spell was failing before I realized I had misremembered a single rune in the bottom right corner of the incantation. It was the first time I’d forgotten something since my awakening. My memory, though excellent, wasn’t quite so flawless as I’d arrogantly assumed.

When I fixed the final rune, the whole spell shimmered in white light. The resonance felt greater, this time, than when I had banished Greg-Theryx with a single rune. In this working, all the runes seemed to cohere into one, gaining energy from how they interacted, their effects compounding, swirling into a spiral of energy that distorted the space underneath me.

My soul began to rise in the air, gently floating a few feet upward without me exerting any effort. Whether this would work anywhere else, I supposed, was another question entirely. But in here, at least, I had made some progress.

My second obstacle, sadly, was the collar around my neck back in the waking world.  But that was an external problem that could not be solved from within myself.

It was time to return.  When I reached the Void portal at the center of the museum, it was already open and waiting for me.

I felt a strange moment of peace, of gratitude, as I passed through it, and everything around me dissolved into nothingness. It was the first time I was aware the entire time as I was transported from the depths of my soul back to wakefulness. I felt like I had gained some kind of new control over myself.

When I awoke, the first thing I felt were my chains. This time, both my hands were shackled rather than just one, and no glass vials were waiting for me.

I felt like shit, and had a killer headache. Somehow, the places where my horns were attached to my head ached like hell. I’d never noticed the weight of them before, but now I felt it with every tiny movement of my head. I wondered if intensely practicing magic while trapped in my psychic void counted as resting, but I doubted it.

By the dim light outside the window, it might have been late evening or early morning. I would need more time to know which. The passage of time had felt strange when I was inside myself, its usual flow disrupted.

I tugged at the chains, testing them, but it was almost perfunctory by this point and my heart wasn’t in it. I stared at the door, hoping someone might walk through.

I sat there doing nothing, double-checking the spell in my head, wondering how I was going to get the chance to use it.

The sun was falling. It was late afternoon, then, only a few hours since Phaedra’s experiment. But time passed slowly, as if the sun wished to hold itself in the sky, and my anxiety grew. What had happened to Mona? It had been a while, too long, since I had last seen her in Phaedra’s lab.  What had happened to her?  What had been done?

At last the sun begin to pass below the mountains. Later, I would split my life into two halves, the moment before the sunset, and the moment after. In that moment, all I knew was that a wave of fear passed over me.

I didn’t know why I was afraid, but my heart began to race, and my breath quickened, my body pumping itself full of adrenaline, or the demonic equivalent, for a danger it couldn’t even identify.

But something had gone wrong, and I knew it in my soul.

Pain washed over me, pain to join the fear, justifying it, a knife carving pieces from my Will. I screamed as the pain grew, building and building, until at last I felt part of myself fall away, retreat from the experience and hide in the deep recesses of my mind.

I saw Mona put her hand against the glass bubble, back in Phaedra’s lab. Now I understood the sadness in her eyes. Had she known, somehow? She had always understood, more than I had, what was at stake for us.

A wave of dread passed over me, the pain receding, as the temperature suddenly dropped. My body shook as if I’d been overcome by a fever. My bones felt frozen through.

As I searched through my perceptions, tracing the edges of my soul in my mind’s eye, I realized that I’d lost a warmth I’d been taking for granted. A refuge I’d never even known to be thankful for.

Mona’s blessings had been visited upon me so slowly, so gradually, I had never properly appreciated them. But something had changed in me when the bond had grown between us. I had come to depend on Mona Fell, in ways big and small, and now…

Something had been done to her. Why else would the link between us have broken like this? I had always felt her fire below me, distant but present, until now.

I stared up at the ceiling of my canopy bed, as I had so many times before. I wanted to scream again, or cry out, but the pain had run its course, and all I felt was numb. I told myself I didn’t know what had happened. Not yet. But I would soon learn, and I would need to keep my head, either way.

My escape plan, if you could call it that, had always been to get down to Mona in the dungeon. She would have known what to do. She would have known where to go. But if Desdemona was truly gone, if Phaedra had slain her as punishment, then I had no one to escape for.

Only someone to avenge.