Mark staggered through the fog, constantly listening for the sounds of his pursuers. He panted to a stop, desperate to catch his breath, but he didn’t know how long he had. The shrieks were farther away, but all it would take was—

A wail split the air around Mark. He lurched back into a hobbled run, his staff now bearing more weight than his mangled leg. One of the creatures materialized out of the gray, just off to the side, and Mark reeled back to avoid running into it.

The thing’s spectral form was first enormous, then it was small. Then it had flesh, then it looked like a long-dead skeleton. Old, young, rich, poor, sick, healthy; the spectre whipped through a cacophony of forms as it lunged to grab Mark. He reeled back to avoid the spectral hand, but the twisting motion forced him to put weight on his injured leg, and the jolt of pain caused him to stumble. He tried to turn the other way, but it was not enough, and the creature’s twisted fingers managed to brush Mark’s shoulder and send a convulsive chill shuddering through his body.

For a moment, there was a wrenching sensation within Mark that mirrored a stabilization of the spectral form across from him, followed by the creature throwing its head back and revelling in the experience. Mark knew from experience that the creature’s reaction was temporary, so he forced himself to push past the awful feeling and resume his hobbled run, knowing that soon the creature’s pursuit would begin anew.

It was all Mark could do to grit his teeth and blink away tears. Ever since the fog had pulled him inside, his life had been a living hell. Pursued relentlessly by the twisted ghosts, they seemed drawn to him no matter where he went, hunting him with that touch that could break his body and overwhelm his mind.

So, on he ran. Leaning heavily on his makeshift staff with every step. Hunger wracking his body and thirst tearing at his throat. He had no idea thirst could be painful. But compared to the alternative of slowing down and having his soul wrenched away, he had no choice but to continue. To ignore the char-covered ground and uncountable obstacles that mocked his every step. Over time he had learned to instinctively dodge the ancient armour and bones that were strewn throughout this gray hellscape; a tableau of the dead still locked in frozen combat. There were no weapons he knew how to use, or even thought would be of use against the spectres, so he didn’t waste time on those remnants of battle. Instead, he focused on speed and the hope that he would somehow be able to break free of the fog and into something resembling salvation.

As Mark ran, he began to detect a gradient of dispersal in the fog that surrounded him. It was small, but his hopes climbed at the prospect that he may be nearing the edge.

Step-by-step, the gradient grew more apparent. The mists stuck to Mark’s torn clothing, and tears leaked down his face, but his conviction that the fog would soon disperse grew, until he finally burst not into salvation, but a graveyard of the damned.

Mark stood there, frozen. A great dome of fog rose over a perfect circle of clarity, surrounded by a single monolithic wall of gray that traced that circle in its entirety. And everywhere, covering every stitch of the ground, were skeletons. They were twisted, grotesque; their armour melted, or their bodies contorted into broken shapes. Some bore extra limbs or distorted proportions. Others were even worse, the posing of their bodies suggesting not a battle, but madness. A war had been fought here long ago, he knew that, but this? Nobody could claim victory on a battlefield where this was the result.

Another shriek cut through the air behind Mark. He spun around. He shouldn’t have stopped. The spectre was going to catch him.

Mark had run enough. Looking at the ground, he spotted one skeleton that seemed untouched by the madness. It had a rusted shortsword lying inside its ribcage, so Mark bent and grabbed the hilt of the weapon—

A cavalryman bore down on the mercenary, but one of the lancers next to him caught the man’s horse in the neck, piercing the carotid and showering the infantry in blood. The animal thudded to the ground, trapping the cavalryman’s leg, so the mercenary danced around the flailing animal and stabbed the man in the chest before quickly moving on. The blow didn’t kill the cavalryman right away—it wasn’t intentional, just a bad strike—but it would do the job eventually. That was all that mattered. At the start of the battle, he would have stuck around to make sure nobody stole his XP, but after days of fighting, he’d ceased to care.

As the mercenary searched for his next target, he spared a glance at the sky overhead, watching it explode in ever-increasing bursts of magic. Invisible protective domes shimmered on both sides as the opponents sought to overwhelm the defensive magic of their foes, and some of those shields did shatter and give way; fire and lightning bursting through to annihilate the troops underneath. But the mercenary couldn’t think about that. The battle had stretched for days, and every day more mages arrived. Normally, if an army could field five or six magic-users, the day would be theirs. This battle was different. As more and more countries took up arms, the stakes had grown until there were hundreds of mages on either side. The power that scorched the skies could have reshaped a continent, but the mercenary did his best to put that out of his mind and focus on his sword. Another kill, another paycheque. That was all that concerned him. That, and staying alive.

An abrupt shimmer and warp ran through the air around the mercenary, his body bulging and retracting uncomfortably, but he kept moving forward. He’d learned his lesson the first time the warping happened, stopping in surprise and almost letting someone run him through as a result. Now those uncomfortable moments came so often that the mercenary barely spared them a thought. A byproduct of all the magic at play, he’d been told. Then the teller had taken an arrow through the neck, and the conversation sort of… died.

The air warped again, but this time it was stronger, and the ground heaved up as a great cracking filled the air. Screams tore from the throats of mages on both sides of the battle as wild energies careened off their bodies, writhing and combining in an unconstrained conflagration of mana. The most powerful of the mages shouted to their fellows to hold on, to contain the flow, but even they were sweating profusely. More than one of them cut off their own magic and fled. The mercenary watched, entranced, as the spasming bands of wild magic streamed out of the magic-users, building in power until they—

A shortsword drove into the mercenary’s belly, severing his diaphragm and cutting off his scream before it could form. He looked into the eyes of his killer and saw the same dispassionate professionalism that he had worn for a hundred kills of his own. The eyes of a fellow mercenary. Then those mercenary eyes grew wild as the man’s jaw distended into gross proportions and his skin stretched, great slabs of fat materializing beneath the surface where none had existed a moment before. What in the world?

Then, a great shredding noise filled the air as the fabric of reality itself ripped, and the world around the mercenary devolved into madness.

People broken and distorted. Horses merging with their riders. Infantrymen turning on their own troops and screaming as they killed. Men turning into babies. Babies turning into old men. Darkness. Light. The sun rising and setting at the same time. Pure, unfiltered chaos.

An agony burst inside the mercenary that was far beyond a wound of the flesh. Something inside him was being ripped away, and to his horror, he saw his Tome appear in the air before him. The book spun as it pulled away from him, and while the mercenary could tell the same thing was happening all across the battlefield, his eyes were locked onto his own book. Something was tearing the mercenary’s Tome away, and if he didn’t intervene, if he let his Tome be taken from him, his soul would be gone forever.

The mercenary propped himself up with one hand and grabbed the handle of the shortsword protruding from his gut. Wrenching the blade halfway out, he stifled the pain and pushed the hilt down toward the ground.

“I die free,” the mercenary spat. Then he pulled, driving the blade up under his ribcage and into his heart.

“What the hell!” Mark shouted, jerking back to reality as he dropped the sword to the ground. Before he could process what he’d seen, the spectre burst out of the gloom, its warped, shifting shape racing towards Mark the moment it caught sight of him. With no chance to run, Mark reflexively raised his makeshift staff like a shield. As though a rough branch he’d picked up off the forest floor could do anything to ward off a tormented and vengeful soul.

The ghostly apparition flew straight through Mark’s arm and grabbed Mark’s head with its outstretched hands. Immediately, Mark’s body started shaking, and he dropped to his knees. This wasn’t like a seizure. Instead, it was as though his body was being wracked by some primal force, and a chaotic stream of visions raced through his brain with such density that he nearly missed the pulling sensation at the centre of his being.

If Mark hadn’t experienced that vision, he wouldn’t have known that what he was feeling was his Tome being forcibly extracted from his body. Nor would he have known the reason behind the desperate hunger that lurked within the spectre’s eyes.

“NO!” Mark roared. With a supreme effort, he forced his shaking muscles to lock down, pushing this invading entity away from him, away from his mind. “Get out of my head!”

At first, the creature didn’t budge. But something inside Mark shifted. The shaking of his muscles became a resonance, building in a power that transformed his physical movement into a wall of mental force that he threw at the creature, pushing it away. The apparition wailed as it inched away, its arms stretching out and trying to maintain a grip on Mark’s head, but Mark never ceased in his assault.

More spectres emerged from the gloom, circling the combatants but unable to get closer than a few metres, the force of the battle keeping them at bay. Meanwhile, Mark kept pushing, forcing the spectre away one centimetre at a time until it was completely free of Mark’s head. He wasn’t able to gain complete freedom, however. Unable to force the tortured soul beyond the extent of his arm, the spectral form continued to engulf Mark’s staff and the hand that grasped it. Even that small touch was enough to drain Mark, and he knew that this battle couldn’t continue forever. What he needed was a way to win.

Plunging his other hand inside the spectre, Mark gripped his staff with both hands and wrenched focus off himself and onto the apparition in front of him. Clamping down with his will, Mark mentally embraced the being’s wildly shifting form and drove down on it, forcing its mad shifting to slow.

The apparition went wild, flailing in panic, but Mark didn’t relent. That resonance inside the spectre felt familiar, as though it echoed something inside of him. Yet as much as the resonance felt like a part of Mark, what was inside the spectre felt alien, something that had been forced upon the creature, fighting and distorting it into the twisted apparition it had become. While Mark didn’t like the idea of kinship with a force that could twist souls into the haunted denizens of the fog, he knew that whatever tiny edge he had couldn’t be wasted, no matter the implications.

Left with no alternative, Mark grabbed onto that resonance and hammered it down on the spectre.

The scream that cut through the fog nearly deafened Mark, filling the air with a tormented wail as the spectre’s very being started to shred under Mark’s onslaught. From every split that appeared in the fibre of the creature’s soul, a massive power started to leak out, filling the air with crackling energy. Mark soon realized that even if he won this battle, if he didn’t do something about the force that was building in the air, he would end up killing himself regardless.

Desperately, Mark cast around for somewhere to direct that power. His first inclination was to use the ground as a sink, bleeding it off like surplus electricity, but he met with such resistance that it was more like pushing electricity through rubber. He tried again with the discarded arms and armour of the long-deceased soldiers but was met again with the same rigid resistance.

With all other options exhausted, Mark attempted to focus that surplus power on the last thing in the world he would have thought capable of handling such force: His crude wooden staff. To Mark’s shock, the wood soaked up power like it was created for that purpose, absorbing so much of the spectre’s fracturing form that it began to hum beneath his hands.

With his prospects for survival renewed, Mark once again bent his will against the creature before him. At some point, the creature’s attempts to attack Mark transitioned into an effort to flee from him, but Mark was too lost in the battle to care; obsessed with the destruction of this creature that had tried to annihilate his very being. The spectre’s form began to distort as it broke apart, its shape stretching out until it completely surrounded the staff into which its essence was being drawn. Mark could sense the battle drawing to a climax, smell the ozone burning the air, feel his hands burning from within the writhing fire of the spectre’s destruction. Then, suddenly, there was a snapping crescendo and an abrupt blast of power as the creature exploded into a swirling miasma that crackled in the air. It lingered, then collapsed into Mark’s staff, searing his hands as it sunk into the rough wood with a crackle of finality that left the staff thrumming with energy.

The unshaved bark beneath Mark’s hands began to blacken and smoulder. He looked at the staff in horror as it started to vibrate, the power too much for a simple wooden branch to handle. Somehow, Mark needed to release that excess energy, but he had no idea how. All he knew for certain was that if he didn’t find a way, he would be destroyed.

In a fit of desperation, Mark raised the staff above his head and drove the butt into the ground, forcing all of the power out of the staff.

It was only at the last moment that Mark remembered how unreceptive the ground had been to this kind of power. He also remembered what happened when you forced too much electricity through rubber.

“Shit.”

The earth buckled beneath Mark’s feet as a spiderweb of cracks appeared in a 5-metre radius around him. Through every crack, a blistering white light shone forth, illuminating the swirling dome of fog in an aurora of fluorescent glow. Then the web collapsed, taking Mark with it.

All was chaos. One moment Mark was falling, then he was on his feet. Then he was falling again, only sideways. Then he was on his feet again. One of his hands had 11 fingers, while his other was purple. Everything was twisted and changing, and with every movement, he felt the same wrenching he had felt in that long-dead mercenary’s vision, only twenty times worse. What the hell was happening?

Mark’s motion stopped—though the shifting of his body didn’t—and he found himself standing in a rock tunnel that extended around a corner into darkness.

No, not darkness, Mark thought. There was a dim multi-hued light ahead. With no other option, he moved towards it.

As Mark rounded the corner, he discovered something that nearly destroyed his mind.

A distorted, twisting ball of power hovered in the air over a gigantic chasm. Its size defied comprehension. It could have been one metre wide or a thousand—Mark’s brain was incapable of processing the scope of the thing. White light arced like electricity around the object, and occasionally a band of light would lance free and hit something, twisting and distorting it into a thousand different possibilities before the object settled on a form completely at random. The result was a gigantic cave covered in all manner of colours, plants, substances, slimes, and even animals, although most of those were distorted messes that clearly hadn’t survived for long.

Once again, it was beyond Mark’s comprehension.

Despite the overwhelming oddness of the thing, something drew Mark to that orb of power. He couldn’t quite explain it, other than to say that it was similar to the resonance he had felt with the spectre, within himself, but on a massive scale. He didn’t know whether he should be speaking to the thing or running away from it, but he found himself drawing closer regardless.

Then Mark became aware of a sliding sensation, as though he were on a moving walkway. Looking at the ground beneath him, Mark realized he was moving toward the wildly fluctuating orb of blue power, but not of his own volition.

It was too much. Dropping his staff, Mark turned and tried to sprint away, but it was useless. Regardless of his efforts, Mark continued his inexorable slide towards the orb and its chasm.

Now panicked, Mark redoubled his efforts, only to trip when the back of his heel clipped a rock and he toppled to the ground. He rolled onto his stomach and clawed at the stone with his hands, but all he managed to do was tear his fingernails off and leave bloody stripes in his wake as he was dragged towards the ledge. When he finally did reach the lip of that fantastic chasm, he braced himself for a gut-wrenching drop, only to discover that instead of falling, he was pulled up into the air, hovering as he continued to be drawn towards that twisting orb of power.

A shock of horror went through Mark when he realized what was happening. Then there was a bright light, a blast of acceleration, and he disappeared inside the orb.