“What are you talking about?” Harriot asked, glaring at the eye. “You don’t have plans of your own. None of us do. This is the natural law of the universe. The Mortal Plane must be destroyed in order to be rebirthed. We have arrived, and so we must carry out our task. This is our duty, as it always has been. You are speaking nonsense.”

“Perhaps I am,” Henry said. The eye flickered. Tendrils of darkness erupted out from it, twirling around the chains and climbing up Harriot’s limbs, enveloping her in a cocoon of shadows.

She struggled against the magic, but the chains already bound her tightly. As Henry’s magic encircled her chest and started up her neck, she looked up at him, fury burning in her eyes. The darkness traveled up her jaw and up the back of her head, leaving only her face uncovered.

For an instant, Henry’s true form flickered at the edge of her vision. Her eyes widened.

“You are not It Who Heralds the End of All Light. Why is there light within you?”

Henry’s hand closed. The darkness enveloped the woman, flooding through her mouth and silencing her. With a thrum, all traces of her magical energy blinked out of existance, sealed off from the rest of the world.

The eye faded away. Above her, standing on the wooden floor, Henry rose to his feet, the white light in his chest shimmering like a cracked star in a sea of darkness.

“Rest here forever,” Henry told the eldritch creature, slipping into the shadows and disappearing without a trace.

Damien ran his hand through his hair. It came away covered in a thin sheen of dust. He rubbed it between his fingers, his emotions still churning within him. It had been several hours since he’d collapsed against the wall.

The spark of passion for magic at the center of his soul was flickering. Assailed from all sides by the events of the past few days, it had started to fade.

Why should I have to deal with this? Henry is locked within me. I don’t need to find the eldritch creatures. Someone else can do that. I’m just seventeen! There are mages who have trained for years who can take care of this.

Henry wasn’t there to answer him. Damien’s fingernails bit into the palms of his hands. As violent emotion churned within him, his soul started to change. Fear and uncertainty encroached on the passion for magic and learning. As it shifted, something broke within Damien’s mind.

A mortal soul shares a few similarities with its meat bag. The most important of which is its ability to recognize what does not belong – and then remove it.

The violent upheaval going on within Damien pushed aside the metaphorical dirt, revealing the powerful magic fettering the half of Henry’s soul that was bound to Damien. Like a school of rabid piranhas, his subconscious mental energy lashed out at the bindings.

Henry’s soul was enormous. Damien had nowhere near enough energy to break the fetters covering it. The whole of his soul’s force was only enough to make a tiny nick within the magic, allowing a miniscule amount of the imprisoned soul to escape.

Damien’s back stiffened as a buried memory thrust itself upon him in complete clarity. It was him four years ago right as he finished drawing the rune circle that would summon Henry.

The desire for magic that the younger version of Damien had had was almost blinding. His hand had trembled with unrestrained excitement as he sat back and prepared to summon his companion and begin the journey that he’d waited so long for.

Damien’s eyes pricked with tears as the vivid memory played itself out. On that day, he hadn’t realized it, but some of that passion had died. The knowledge of what he carried within himself had soured his love.

Unable to stop the memory, he was forced to watch as his younger self began the ritual to summon a companion. And then, at the very corner of his younger selves eye, Damien saw something that he didn’t remember.

A flicker of darkness at the corner of his vision. It passed in less than a second, crossing over his runes and wiping a miniscule line of chalk away.

Damien’s body stiffened. He remembered that rune – it had been the one that had sent the call to the void instead of the Planes. The other rune he’d made a mistake in was behind him, but something told Damien that it too had been altered.

“Someone did this to me,” Damien breathed. “I didn’t mess up drawing my rune circle.”

The memory faded away, leaving Damien alone on the dusty ground once more. Damien stared at the wall, his blood pumping faster and faster.

“Somebody took my chances of a normal life away from me. I was robbed.”

Damien’s soul shifted once again. The spark at the center of his soul flared with indignant anger. The beginnings fear and uncertainty clawing their way into him were shattered and blown away. The emptiness they left behind vanished, filled by something that Damien had lacked for the last four years: a true sense of purpose.

“Somebody is trying to use me,” Damien growled to himself. “And that person wanted the void creatures to get onto this world. What else have they done to manipulate me?”

He rose to his feet, his hands clenched tightly at his sides. The spark of desire within him encircled itself with an iron shield of determination. If someone else had been in the room, they would have seen an imperceptible shift within the boy’s eyes. The defeated, lost look was replaced by confidence.

“You might have forced me to have an eldritch creature as a companion, but I won’t let you take away my love for magic,” Damien said. “I’m going to find whoever you are, and we’re going to have a little chat.”

If anything had heard him, it didn’t respond. Damien didn’t care. A laugh escaped his lips and he reached out, strumming the lines of Ether like a harp. It flooded into him eagerly, awaiting his command like a trained hound.