In an instant, everything changed.

Cold isolation: that was the sudden irrefutable truth of my situation as I lost contact with the Physical. I couldn’t sense anything the Astral, only the massive, formless presence surrounding me. Thinking of it now, it reminds me of floating in the void of space beyond the reach of light.

My body, unable to detect any targets, ceased its rampage on the invader; it was still. A deep chill ran through my structures, something that should have been impossible given the lack of temperature in the Astral. I’m not proud to say it but I was terrified.

The invader pressed in from all sides, simultaneously heavy yet incorporeal. The only stimulation that I experienced then was the depth of its power and the enormity of its existence. The invader outstripped me in complexity, size, mana capacity, and every other metric I could think of by far.

I barely had any time to fully comprehend the severity of my situation before the pain started.

The chill became an ache and the ache became a sharp burn. I turned my attention to the source of the pain, the outermost regions of my body. There, the invader’s incomprehensible grip tore away several structures with agonizing slowness.

I tried to stop it.

I pulled against its hold. I turned my defensive structures to the task hoping to push off the invader. I fed mana to the accosted structures to maintain their integrity. I attempted to modify the structures to make them impossible to remove.

Nothing worked. I lost them, one by one. The pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt similar to having one’s flesh flayed by a lethargic torturer. I couldn’t tell how long it took. The agony became a new part of my existence. It scarred my deepest structures barely missing my core, not just because of the sensation but the emotional turmoil it created as I fought a futile battle for my survival.

Finally, it ended. Yet, I received no respite. The chill deepened into an ache once again as it worked its way into my body. Then, that ache became a slow burn.

“How have you come to be? So pure and hollow.”

The psychic communication came like a whisper in the darkness yet it ripped through my body like a sonic boom through a house of glass. Millions of my structures ruptured only to be quickly reassembled by the defensive structures close to my core. My mana levels dropped by nearly ten percent.

Though destructive, the message delivered a sentiment that told me much. I was irregular among astral beings. I had things confused all this time, the nature of pure mana and specialized mana. This entity’s other victims had all had some sort of specialization and only a few were at my level of power. Astral beings seemed to specialize much sooner than I had. They did so to survive among others of their kind. Specialization granted power and faster growth at the cost of a narrower focus. Yet, I, and to some extent, Libbu, hadn’t specialized for the majority of our progression. We had never felt a need to do so. Only my drive to save Libbu had driven me to discover psykhe. I had reached the Ninth Order of Astral Power, alone and with nothing but pure mana.

I had no idea what that meant, the significance of it, and neither did this unfathomable entity.

Stop, I—, I attempted to communicate with the entity but it had little interest in my thoughts. Instead, its power scoured my body raking my structures with gentle cruelty in search of an answer to its question. My memories, my thoughts, it turned them over in its grip like one might a curious bauble.

I was helpless before this being. I could do nothing as it committed a violation upon my essence. I could only watch.

I couldn’t take it. I needed some other stimulus aside from the pain and its cruelty. So, I fell into my dream state accepting my helplessness and attempting to formulate an alternative course of action. For that, I needed information.

The decision turned out to be a double-edged sword.

The pain and hopelessness intensified to a degree that nearly crippled my mind. Only the whispers saved me, the whispers of countless souls trapped within the entity. They begged for help, jeered at my helplessness, cried from loneliness, and so much more. The quiet clamor soothed my ailing essence.

I sorted through the filler looking for anything I could use. I found something yet I feared to listen. The soul rambled about the end times, of creeping darkness, and dark Truth.

Still, I listened.

This entity predated the birth of light in the Physical. It sat in a position of irrefutable power, an Aspect. I had no clue what they meant at the time yet the knowledge instilled despair in my deepest thoughts.

It was one of the first, the first entities to awaken in the Astral. Like I had for millennia, it lurked for eons but unlike me, it was alone. However, its loneliness wasn’t the product of circumstance like mine. No, the isolation was deliberate on its part.

This entity ambushed and engulfed anything it came across using patience, deception, and unquestionable power. Other astral beings had been its main prey but they weren’t its only victims. Planets, stars, galaxies: they all fell beneath the shadow. It never rushed, it never tired. The shadow crawled through the cosmos leaving nothing but emptiness, death, and its strange mana in its wake.

The mad soul who delivered the information laughed at my terror before the ancient entity. It tried to whisper something else, something I knew shouldn’t know. The souls who still had hope saved me. Somehow, they prevented the dark Truth from reaching me and I watched as their souls withered into nothingness.

I had never seen a soul destroyed so utterly. I hadn’t even believed it possible outside of unsupported speculation. The mad soul laughed again. It was different than the others. It seemed at home in the unending darkness, an empty existence teetering on the verge of paradox. Its gaze disregarded the darkness as power swelled within the shadow. The soul whispered one final thing and its voice was not its own.

“How have I come to be? So tainted and bloated.”

The soul vanished and the shadow peeled another section of my outer structures from my body. Its grasp reached deeper grabbing hold of some of my inner structures. It began to slowly tear them away. The agony caused my mind to buckle momentarily while I adjusted.

I could barely parse the soul’s last message and more importantly, the information within it through the torture.

The shadow sought an end to its eternal prowl through the Astral. An end for an entity who’d witnessed the first light in the cosmos and consumed many of the oldest beings in the Astral, it was almost laughable.

“The Mad Titan laughs, the Weeping Sun laments, the Languid King waits… What will come of the Nascent Soul when our dark brother is finished?”

The soul’s words found my senses in the storm of agony. Unlike the mad soul, they rang with clarity and purpose. I looked for it yet I saw nothing. The only thing about the soul I could garner from its whispers was an inherent femininity. It reminded me of Libbu, the way she took on the feminine guise by choice as opposed to the soul of a female mortal. It was a subtle difference but the smallest bit of information on the unknown could be useful.

Who… are you? I communicated through the storm of horrendous sensations.

“A Sanguine Dream…”

Despite her clear communications, the meaning behind them might as well have been babble. Even with the benefit of psychic communication through the Astral, I only witnessed twisted scenes and incomplete emotions. There were hints of the true nature of the being and the others it spoke of but aside from their status as creatures of power before the shadow fell upon them, everything else could have been whispers of truth or complete nonsense.

I tried the simple solution. I listened more closely fighting through my agony and asked a question.

What are you?

“I lay in dark and dreaming sleep, unbound in shadow until the light is found. Still weak, I wake to find countless ages past and a traveler of the path we seek.” She said. Her thoughts almost seemed like a song yet there was no melody to accompany them. Within the communication, the tiniest bit of mana leaked through which astonished me. Everything within the shadow had taken on its traits and its insidious mana had permeated the innumerable trapped souls leaving room for nothing else.

However, as I thought about the situation, I realized that the ability to communicate beyond the fundamental emotions of their souls marked the Sanguine Dream and the Mad Titan as exceptions to the rule already. If they could maintain even the semblance of personality after being devoured by the shadow, then it wasn’t so unreasonable that they could hold onto some small portion of their original mana.

More importantly, she had referred to “the path we seek”. The “we” included her and the three others she mentioned and I was certain I was the traveler. The unclear point involved the “path” itself. I couldn’t understand the jumble of emotions attached to the word. I had to find out though. If I had something these beings wanted, then I could use it to bargain with them.

It’s not like I had any other options.

What is the path you seek?

“In torpor, we languish, our lives no more. We weep for breath and fear of death. Our dreams bring sanguinity; a thing unhinged when madness speaks, we see.”

Her words hadn’t been her own, not completely. At that moment, she spoke with four voices, each fighting for control of the message. I barely made heads or tails of it as I listened with all the focus I could muster.

Meanwhile, the shadow finished tearing away the first of my inner structures and started on the next in its path to my core. I had no idea what it would do there but I didn’t intend to find out if I could help it.

I unfolded the mystery given by the Sanguine Dream with relative ease. So many years dealing with humans had provided the experience needed to understand those who speak in nonsense. Although, I wished I could’ve simply compelled or commanded her to speak her mind clearly and concisely like I could with humans, Unfortunately, the circumstances prevented anything of the sort and I wasn’t sure I would’ve been able to do it if she were alive.

Their desire was clear. They sought escape from the shadow’s depths and they wanted to live in the Physical as they once had. Additionally, they believed I was capable of doing what they wished which I might have dismissed out of hand if not for the certainty in the Sanguine Dreams message. The knowledge that I might have a method of escape yet unthought of gave me some hope; however, no amount of consideration summoned any capability I had or could create that would free me let alone four other entities.

I understood her reference to the soul which destabilized when someone lapsed into madness. I had discovered that long ago while observing the effects of my fleshwarping on humans who failed to come to grips with their new forms. Given the proper amount of time to find compatible hosts, I could bind their souls to live mortals with psykhe essentially restoring them to life. Not that it would matter without a way to break free of the shadow.

The Sanguine Dream also referred to me as the Nascent Soul. Taking into account the eternal nature of souls, I knew that creating a soul for myself might be a way to preserve my core and essence but that was a dismal goal. Preserving my essence meant suffering for eternity within the shadow while my home was devoured and Libbu was destroyed. I doubted I could incorporate her core structures into my soul without altering them irrevocably if I could at all.

How do I bring you all onto the path? How do we escape? I managed to ask while the integrity of my body shook.

No answer came immediately. I had to wallow for a time in my suffering.

The shadow had moved onto another set of structures. My thoughts were beginning to grow disjointed and my focus momentarily slipped. I might’ve had millions upon millions of structures within my body but the shadow’s power seemed to permeate the entirety of it as it advanced. The damage it was doing affected me on a deeper level than it should have given how narrow it was.

I couldn’t continue like this much longer even if it never reached my core.

“To Know is to Be and trust is to Know another. To trust an unknown, a Covenant must be made.”