He found himself sitting on the grassy hill once again. A cold breeze swept across his skin, bringing up goosebumps. Damien shivered, summoning his clothes around himself and standing.

The sky twinkled with faint gray stars and he felt more sluggish than he normally did. “Henry?”

The faint light that covered the hillside vanished and Damien’s skin prickled even harder.

“Henry?”

“Be careful! Herald is –”

Damien didn’t hear the rest of Henry’s sentence. The world shattered, fragments of the hill and sky falling past Damien like shards of broken glass. A violent gale whipped across his face, sending the fragments flying and leaving him floating in an endless sea of black.

One by one, stars blinked to life in the distance. They provided just enough light for Damien to make out Herald’s emotionless form standing before him like a gross perversion of Henry.

“What do you want?” Damien asked, hiding his fear with confidence as his feet touched the ground.

“You witnessed the Corruption,” Herald whispered. “And yet you do nothing. No – not nothing. You preserve it within the body of another mortal. Do you not understand the threat of which we face? The Seeds are mere hints of the true force that you ignore.”

“I’m working on it,” Damien said angrily. “We nearly got killed fighting the Seed. I need to get stronger.”

“And yet you spend your days playing with the girl,” Herald accused. “You lack urgency.”

“I’m a human, not a machine. I’m training constantly. Taking a day to relax and de-stress isn’t going to do anything,” Damien snapped. “It’s not like I’m blowing off my responsibilities. Surely even you can see that I’m improving quickly.”

“For a mortal,” Herald said. “But you could be more.”

“What else could I possibly do? Nobody can train every waking hour of their life. I love magic, but I need breaks. It’s not like I’m taking a week off!”

“Indeed,” Herald said. The stars twinkled around him. “That is the problem. You are a mere mortal, yet the fate of the world is trapped within your body. You stated the problem yourself. You are not a machine. Perhaps we need to modify that.”

The darkness surrounding them receded, revealing a black marble pillar on the floor directly before Damien. It stood at roughly his height. It was perfect aside from a miniscule crack at the top.

Herald stepped forward, running a finger down the stone and leaving a trail of faint light in its wake. “Henry has concealed the greatest benefits of our bargain. Allow me to assist you.”

Twinkling lights lit up over the pillar. Herald spun it around, revealing two runes that perfectly matched the ones on Damien’s chest. The lights surrounding the pillar shifted, forming patterns and creating hundreds of runes in a circle that joined with the ones that had already been carved into the pillar.

“Accept the rest of your soul, Damien Vale.”

Agony carved through Damien’s chest. He doubled over, unable to even open his mouth to speak as his chest started to tear itself apart. Brilliant lines of white light lit up beneath his shirt, shining through it and illuminating the runes that were etching themselves into his skin.

He clawed at his chest, sweat pouring down his forehead as he desperately tried to block out the pain. Nothing worked. Herald stood over Damien as he collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath.

After what felt like hours but was only truly a few minutes, the pain started to recede to a violent throb. There was no blood on Damien in the dream world, but his hazy mind pointed out that he’d probably soaked his bedsheets again.

“What did you do?” Damien asked, his heart hammering in his chest.

“Nothing, yet,” Herald replied. The eldritch creature raised a hand and set it on the top of the pillar. Ice filled Damien’s veins as a sense of wrongness filled every fiber of his being. Herald’s hand tightened on the marble.

Cracks spiderwebbed down it, travelling several inches before stopping. Then the top portion of the pillar shattered. Dark smoke surged out of it, rocketing through the air and slamming into Damien’s chest.

He screamed as the pain returned, this time permeating every single fiber of his body. The runes on his chest flared with light as his body contorted. A foreign presence enveloped his mind, pressing inwards and reaching towards his soul.

Damien drew a sharp breath as the pain started to dull. Memories as old as time rose at the fringes of his mind, but they weren’t his. Eons of time, forgotten eras and magic that he never could have comprehended. The world started to spin as his own memories and thoughts were crushed under the sheer weight of the being materializing within him.

It felt like an entire ocean had been condensed into a single block and dropped squarely on top of him. His limbs stiffened and refused to work as more and more of Damien’s personality started to crumble.

“Stop fighting it,” Herald said. “This power belongs to you. It has been bound to your soul for years. Henry simply sealed it away, keeping your strength hidden from you.”

“I don’t want it,” Damien rasped, his hands clenched.

“But it is yours nonetheless.”

Damien’s eyes narrowed. Through the haze of pain, anger started to build. He’d started to lose count of the times that Herald had done something like this. The anger built, wrapping his mind and pressing back against the darkness.

“No.”

“What?”

“I said, no,” Damien snarled, his face contorting in anger. His mental energy surged forth, pressing against the foreign energy and bringing it to a grinding halt. “This is my body and my mind. I’m not your damned tool, Herald.”

Chains of mental energy ripped out from the core of Damien’s mind, enveloping the darkness and yanking it downwards. The energy struggled against him, but he had the home ground. The runes on his chest flared even brighter as the darkness struggled. Damien willed his shirt off and looked down at the circle on his chest.

Now that it had been completed, Damien could actually understand much of what had been carved into him. He didn’t understand several of the runes and he would have vastly preferred to have more time, but that was no longer an option. From what he could tell, it was exactly what Herald had said it was. It was a containment circle that essentially turned his body into a cage to keep the other half of Herald’s soul.

He gritted his teeth and extended his hand. A sharp blade popped into it and Damien brought it to his chest, mapping out another, much smaller, rune circle within his mind. Then he thrust the blade forwards.

Hot pain seared him as he dragged the knife across his skin, carving runes into his skin with deliberate strokes. He didn’t stop to consider what would happen if he made a mistake or had incorrectly understood what Herald had done to him.

The chains holding down Herald’s soul started to fray and shatter as it struggled against him. Damien gritted his teeth but didn’t change his pace. Moving faster would just result in a mistake, and this had to be perfect on the first try.

He was thankful that there was no blood in this realm, or it would have been excessively difficult to see what he was doing. Carving upside down was one thing, but carving when he couldn’t even see the surface through a pool of blood was another.

“Stop,” Herald said, his words splitting into thousands of voices. “Enough resisting. Accept your power.”

“Shut up,” Damien hissed through clenched teeth. “You can’t do anything but watch, can you? The contract won’t let you. If I make a mistake while carving, it could kill or seriously injure me.”

Herald said nothing, which Damien took as agreement. He turned his full attention back to the knife and continued his work. He wished that the pain would just fade away into the background as he worked, but no such luck occurred.

Every single stroke he made was a new challenge. There were several moments where his hand seized and he nearly dropped the blade, but he refused to unclench his hand. Damien pushed onwards, carving the new rune circle along the inside of the one that Herald had made.

He carved the final line across his chest, finishing the circle and connecting it with the larger one. Damien doubled over as it lit up with the same white light. Pressure exploded forth within him, piercing into the darkness like thousands of spears.

The pain enveloping the boy’s mind receded by the barest amount. Then, like a whirlpool had formed beneath the darkness of Herald’s soul, it started to siphon away out of his mind. It was torn out of Damien’s mind and flew into his chest and core, where the runes started to contain it.

As the massive soul gave ground, Damien’s own memories and true self started to return. He let out a relieved sigh. The pain hadn’t vanished, but it had faded enough that he could think straight again.

Herald observed Damien silently as the boy ran his fingers along his chest. His breathing still hadn’t returned to normal, but it didn’t feel like he was trying to inhale glass anymore. The last bits of the huge soul were siphoned away and vanished into the rune circle on his chest.

The light, which had been a brilliant white, had faded to inky black. Tendrils stretched out across his skin on either side of the circle, as if they were trying to escape. However, they stopped after just a few inches.

“I did it,” Damien breathed.

“Indeed,” Herald said. Damien looked up at it, glaring.

“Don’t try to pretend like this was your plan. If I hadn’t stopped it, your soul would have crushed me!”

“You would have been improved,” Henry replied. “That is not my soul anymore. It is yours. I was simply returning it to you. Personality changes over the eons. It is of no consequence. So long as the cycle does not fail, you will experience this yourself, with or without my assistance.”

“You’re insane,” Damien said, straightening. “My personality is who I am. If that changes, I may as well have died.”

“I am the Void,” Herald replied. “And you have improved. I could not care less about your personality. Our contract is at the soul level, not mere consciousness. You have not been harmed, and your power has grown. I would have preferred the alternative method, but I will accept this.”

“Just let me go. We’re done here.,” Damien said. “And don’t even think about breaking the rest of that pillar. I’ll kill myself before I let you puppet my body around.”

Herald shook his head. “That portion of soul is not mine to control anymore. You’ll understand at some point. However, I agree with you on one point. There is no need to dally with you further.”

The pitch black floor fell out from beneath Damien. He plummeted downwards, splashing into a cold liquid. It rushed into his open mouth and filled his lungs in moments.

Damien’s eyes widened and he flailed his arms, trying to swim upwards and get a breath of air. Color exploded in his vision as Herald’s world vanished. Gentle rain pattered down on him from the shower within his room. Sylph had her arms wrapped tightly around his chest, keeping him exposed to as much of the healing water as possible.

“This is becoming a habit, isn’t it?” Damien asked, his words coming out garbled and weak.

“Damien! I wasn’t sure if I’d gotten you to the shower in time,” Sylph said, letting out a stressed sigh. “I thought you’d actually died. What happened? Did Henry do this?”

“No,” Damien said, shaking his head and grimacing as a droplet of water hit him in the eye. He blinked it out and Sylph slowly helped him stand fully upright. “It’s a side effect of similar nature, though. Not something we should talk about openly.”

Damien felt Henry stir within him, and a flicker of his companion’s anger reached him. He got the feeling that Henry was about to have a very tense talk with Herald. However, the void creature said nothing to him.

Sylph’s hair brushed his shoulder as she nodded. He carefully tried to shift his weight forward to stand on his own, but his legs buckled underneath him. If it wasn’t for Sylph holding him upright, he would have fallen.

“Careful,” Sylph warned, tightening her grip on him. “I don’t think the water can restore blood loss very well. You need to eat something.”

“That might be a good idea,” Damien agreed, his voice returning to normal. After a few more seconds, he turned the shower off. Sylph carefully slipped under his arm and practically dragged him back into the main room.

Damien’s bed looked like someone had been murdered in it. It was completely and utterly soaked with blood. Even the floor and surrounding area had been covered. Sylph had managed to save his travel pack and move it to the side, but just about everything else was a lost cause.