The prison-world swallowed Nic.

He landed in a desert of black sand. He slammed into the ground, sinking quickly, the uniform black grains pouring over him. He reached to push aura through the Sandrider Blade, to take control of the desert around him-

And nothing happened.

His aura was locked coldly in his veins, pressed into a useless, sluggish form by an immense spiritual weight. That weight came from the sun above, an artificial star that blazed with power and held him down.

As Nic sank, his eyes adjusted to the stomach churning nature of this world. It was a cube, with gravity adhering to all six of its walls. A perfect prison, with no sky, no horizon to escape to.

Only endless sand.

Sand that was swallowing him, slowly, dragging him under. The more Nic fought, the faster he was pulled downwards.

So - reluctantly - he forced himself to be calm. To let the sand slowly take him, as he plotted and schemed. Nic hated the feeling of the growing weight, but he forced himself to subdue that itch in the back of his mind, resisting the urge to struggle.

This was a prison.

He had escaped prisons before.

“Sofia?” He asked.

Nobody responded. Nic had expected that- cutting off access to Sophonts seemed to be a common trick. But Nic wasn’t truly alone. He still had his crystalline eyes, and he slowly opened the channels to the wave of golden information they carried.

Runes spread across the desert. Although from the surface, the black sand looked monotonous and monotone and without features…

Nic’s eyes could see the formation underneath. The flowing lines of power.

The entire desert was a complex puzzle, and his eyes began to hurt, his head aching, as he took in the complex flows and interchanges of power. The core of it all was the sun, blazing with little golden markings describing the fluctuations in its power. It fed down into the desert, feeding sinking traps below the earth…

Since he had no way of going up, Nic focused on down.

The lines converged at a certain point beneath the sand, pouring in and out as if the nexus was a beating heart, propelling blood through the desert prison’s ‘veins’.

Nic, of course, didn’t have any aura. He couldn’t harm the leylines at all…

But scuttling around his shoulders, making frightening, bubbly noises, was Gwungo. The slimy little axolotl was like a sailor on a drowned ship, clambering over Nic’s face to try and stay above the rising sand.

“Oh no! Oh no no, very bad, maybe the worst…” The little slime was burbling nervously.

“Gwungo…”

“Yes very possibly, awfully truthfully, just terrible!”

“Gwungo!” Nic snapped. The lizard stopped, bubbles bursting from its mouth. “I need you working with me. I can’t do anything right now…”

Nothing but sink, anyway.

“But you can. I need you to adapt to this place. We won’t have a lot of time, but we’re going to eat our way out.”

The little lizard nodded its head enthusiastically. Nic was down to his shoulders now, holding his hands above the sinking sand to keep them mobile for as long as he could. Gwungo leapt off his face, kicking him in the mouth, and ran up his arm to the tips of his fingers.

“I will try!” The blob declared. “But this place… spooky spooky…”

“Yeah…” Nic said, feeling the sand rising, up to his neck now… “Tell me about it.”

And slowly, waiting, desperately trying to stir his brains into spitting out some perfect solution…

Nic sunk.

He began to move again. It would make him sink faster- but he wanted to sink faster. He wanted to guide his trajectory, moving sluggishly against the sand to push himself off in a particular direction, heading for one of the formation’s ‘hearts’. If there was any chance for him and Gwungo to break this prison’s grip on him…

It would be there.

But as he swam down, bracing his lungs for a long, breathless descent, the sand began to flow in the opposite direction. As he sank under the weight and darkness of the sinking desert, a force began to push him up again. The world flowed like a great river trying to shove him aside.

He resisted for as long as he could, before being dislodged and shoved upwards. There was no leverage down below. He surfaced, exploding up into the sunlight with a gasp. Gwungo gasped alongside him, mostly out of panic- as best as Nic could tell the little slime didn’t need air.

He was rooted by his lower body, and slowly, he began to sink again.

Understanding settled in.

There were waves beneath the sand, alternating in direction. He wasn’t in a deadly trap…

Just a sadistic one.

A pit that would drown him to the edge of life, then spare him, again and again. Submerging him and then allowing him up to breathe. Likely, the idea was to occupy his time with torment so he couldn’t plan his way out.

Nic snarled. If they thought putting him under pressure would shake him, they were wrong.

The angrier Nic got, the more a terrible, cold clarity rippled through his mind. Anger…

For a while, Nic had wondered what Esper really did for him. What the mysterious energy of the mind felt like…

It was his anger. Nic remembered what it had been like before, back on city d23, when rage would fill his mind like a black, muddling cloud. It was hot and blinding and turned him clumsy. Now, his anger was cold and focused like a scalpel.

He smiled faintly.

Of course the energy of his mind would be rage.

“Gwungo, any headway?”

“Yes yes! Much progress, much learning…” Tiny crystalline organs were blossoming in his belly, resembling something between flowers and frozen stars. Colorful strands of material like waxy coral twisted and grew from his skin. “Very strange, this place… Very un… Very not like…”

As the tiny being sputtered and tried to put its thoughts into words, Nic began to sink again. This time he gathered his strength.

And called forth the runes of the Aleph. From his skin they emerged, trailing through the air like a serpent of golden-white fire; the prison had no way to constrain the power of his Concepts, even if they could seal his Essence and aura away.

He sank the runes into his own arm.

He’d dabbled in self-mutilation via the Concept of Sacrifice. Burning his own Essence for energy was as violent as cutting off his own arm.

Well…

Now he’d go further.

Now, he let the runes of Antares burn his flesh down to Essence, let Sacrifice render Essence into aura…

He consumed himself, feeling the runes sink down into his skin, eating away his flesh like a lightless, pale flame. Feeling his flesh wither and dissolve. Feeling it all become fire.

For a moment, the sun wasn’t able to restrain him. His aura flared free. He seized control of the sand and plummeted down, forming a tunnel and dropping like a stone through the depths. As he sank down, down, down into the depths of the earth, he tunneled for the formation’s heart, following the flow of golden diagrams that flooded his vision.

It was a massive pillar of crystal. It rose from the unseen ‘floor’ of the prison, black and glittering, directing the flow of energy through the jail.

Nic latched on like a leach, already beginning to feel his surge of aura bleed away. The sun’s dominating control over energy within the prison was too strong to resist forever.

But he had made it to his goal. He grabbed hold, the sand beginning to fall down from above, collapsing his tunnel. “Gwungo, now!”

“But! But but but-” The little axolotl-slime hesitated, flicking its head back and forth in agitation. “What if you don’t come back!? What if I’m stuck here!”

Nic gritted his teeth. “I’ll goddamn claw my way out of the hells to get you, okay? I just- We need to do this, and we need to do this now!”

The little slime paused for a moment more, and then scurried onto the pillar, expanding into a web of slimy feelers that engulfed the obelisk.

Nic had no more time. The sand rose and pushed him away, and for a moment, his world was darkness and the roiling motion of the earth around him. He was being thrown higher, higher, higher- his lungs constricting with the weight and pressure until his head swum from lack of breath…

And then he was pushed back up to where he started, alone in the desert. He coughed up a spray of sandy grit, his one hand clutching the earth, raking at the soil. “Goddamnit…” With his aura sealed over, his devoured arm wasn’t coming back any time soon.

It was a bleeding stump, sending stabbing feelers of pain up his shoulder and into his skull. Exhaustion and heat and anger ran together into a muddy mix of dark emotion. His headache throbbed.

He had no resistance left as the sea of sand washed him back and forth, submerging him and allowing him to breathe in slow, torturing intervals.

Interminable moments passed. He stared into the sun until its afterglow hung in his eyes even as he was dragged under.

And then, something changed. A cool, water-fragrant wind blew through the desert. He stirred, blinking his eyes until the scarred afterlight of the sun faded.

“Your presence has been requested.”

The elven sand devil stood over him, scowling. She snapped her fingers and the desert spat him out, the grains of sand forming a solid walkway underfoot.

A door was waiting, floating in the air.

“Our queen wishes to speak with you.”

Nic cursed through a terminally dry mouth. With his missing leg and arm, he could barely move. He gestured to the stumps, glaring up at her, silent.

“You can crawl. It will suit you.” She said, with satisfaction.