One moment I’m falling through the abyss, the next, I’m standing in the dusty remains of a lakebed. The sounds of night in the forest chirp and squeak and sway around me, as though nothing had changed.

An angry red scar in the center of my palm. That’s what the light decayed into. Some kind of rune, obviously, but seemingly carved or burned into my skin when I touched the… water spirit. It’s the only way I can actually convince myself that the weird, dreamlike experience actually happened. A quick examination of my body indicates that only the one rune appeared, but I have no idea what it does. A quick look into my Energy view indicates nothing out of the ordinary in that spot. I was a little concerned that the rune would have ended up carved into my Energy as well, somehow forcing an Energy rune together using the huge collection I made available right at the contact point… but no.

Kaythe’s silhouette still lingers around my shoulders, causing a pang of guilt to shoot through me, reminding me what my outburst was actually all about. Opting to put off further thinking until I’m back in the relative safety of the camp, I start the short trek back only to bump into something where I could have sworn there was only empty space.

“Hey!” The particularly solid shadow whispers indignantly. Distracted as I was with my musings, I manage only a yelp of surprise before instinctively kicking off the ground with an Energy infused retreat. It only occurs to me that the whisper sounded very familiar and, combined with the fact that it didn’t stab me, it’s probably the resident rogue.

Despite my rapid means of egress, I manage to land on my feet, kicking up a huge amount of dust and carving two long troughs through the lakebed in the process. After sheepishly walking back out of the resulting dust cloud to find Lauren standing there looking equal parts exasperated and angry, she responds to my attempt at a congenial smile by punching me. Hard.

“Ok, fine I- OW!- Ok! Enough, I get it! -OW!- Why?!” Not just once, either.

“You fucking idiot! You’re always such an idiot! Don’t you ‘why’ me! ‘Why’ you! You freak me out getting kidnapped, fine, that wasn’t your fault, but then you come back all fucked up beyond anything I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen you moments from death! There was no cocksure attitude, no confidence you’d be fine, you looked like you were gone! And then, you go silent. Spending hours meditating and talking to no one… fine, ok, maybe you needed to solve something, but then you went to Cerberus. After telling me everything was fine.”

“You heard-”

“Yes I fucking heard! The faintest noises make me hyper aware now, even when I’m trying to sleep, so I heard every fucking word! How did it not occur to you, despite everything I told you about what happened to me, that I know what you mean?!” Her whispered tirade ends, leaving her breathless. I open my mouth to speak, but don’t know what to say. I had still been more focussed on myself when she had started speaking, and only realized how actually furious she was when she let emotion creep into her whisper shouting. Therefore, it takes me several more seconds of digesting before I realize what she’s saying.

“You also have a violent version of yourself vying for control.” Of course she does, why else “-did you think I wanted your Energy-” so often, she needed it to- “resist it! It let me push that side away!” Otherwise she would have let her core personality fade into obscurity, the same way my Insanity wants me to.

You know, I judge others for being self centered, but despite all my ability to understand and help others, I’m one of the worst offenders.

“Sorry- OW! Ok! No more apologies, I’ll accept your-OW, Hey!- I want your help! Happy?!”

“No.” She gives me a withering look, but lets it fall after only a moment. Dropping her fist, she instead pushes some dirty hair out of her face. “-But I’ll help you anyway.”

---

“It’s a part of me. That’s the main issue I’m dealing with; I can’t just destroy a part of myself.”

“You could, but that would be dumb, even for you.” She meets my scowl with a small smile. “No, and you’re thinking about it in the wrong way. You have a set of steps you use to solve every issue: talk it out and convince the other that your way is right, then use force if you don’t get your way. That won’t work here.”

I look at her, cocking one eyebrow in question. “I get why violence isn’t the best call here, but why wouldn’t diplomacy work?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Diplomacy, especially the way you do it, involves knowing more than the other party. Manipulating them into believing as you do, and doing what you think is best. But somehow you’ve failed to remember-”

“My opponent is me, and knows exactly what I’m doing.” She gives me a look like she’s walking a toddler through basic arithmetic. “Sure, lord it over me while you can. This once, you thought of something I didn’t.”

“Oh.” She scoffs. “Alright, cause you intuitively knew how to perform Alchemy and sneak around, never once benefitting from me. Oh grand savior Amadeus, how did I ever live without you? How did I effortlessly slaughter so many monsters without your… guiding touch?”

My temper flares, and I’m sorely tempted to walk away, but I’m being stupid and she’s right. I beat back the temptation and forcibly relax myself, trying to let go of the stupid anger that isn’t even directed at her.

I’ve been too busy focussing on solving problems that I haven’t been thinking about them, and that’s the issue. Lauren should be making fun of me. The issues with my approach are glaring in this case, but… I don’t know an alternative except trapping Insanity, which is a lot like ‘repressing’ it. The second I lost my nerve and let my guard down, he’d be back in full force, angry and more powerful from being pushed down.

“What… do you think I should do?” I say, finally, hoping she’ll drop the teasing smile.

She ignores my unspoken wish. “Make a deal.”

“Come again?”

“It’s your mind. Your rules, at least to a degree. Bind it to an agreement that suits both of your purposes.”

“That doesn’t-... hmm.” It isn’t a solution, but it effectively eliminates the problem anyway. Or, it could if I do it right. “But a big part of deal making is like diplomacy: it requires external knowledge to get the best deal.”

“This might shock you to the core, but you’ll have to make do with a fair deal.”

“My deals aren’t… that unfair.” I protest weakly, and her knowing look heavily implies she doesn’t believe it for a second.

“From what you’ve told me about your first meeting with ‘Insanity’ (I wince at how she makes it sound much more stupid than I feel it deserves), you tried to pull one over on yourself and get a perfect deal for you. How would you feel if someone did that to you? Probably angry. Remove a little self control…”

“And I end up being pushed off a tree. Point taken.”

We had opted to sit and talk a bit away from camp, and though Cerberus had come by shortly after Lauren found me to check that everything was fine, we were mostly left alone. I don’t exactly feel comfortable sitting in the open like this, but between the two of us, very little could get close enough to harm us undetected.

Well, very little that either of us know of…

Still, I opt to prolong the chance to talk to her more openly just a little longer. “What was it like for you?”

“Hmm? Wrangling my inner demon? ...Yeah. Not great. I guess… we both knew that I had to be the one in charge, or eventually something was going to kill me. Strangely, you never really seemed to notice that I… wasn’t the dominant one at first.” She looks at me expectantly, and I’m certainly confused enough to oblige.

“You mean you’re the interloper? The fractured piece?”

“Shitty way to put it, but yeah. My mind was a mess, and I had two mindsets, two mentalities that had any real sway. I don’t think there was a true… uh, ‘separation’ for me like you describe. I mean, I talked to myself, but I was never under the impression that we were separate entities… just two ways of looking at the world, with two goals. Nobody can hurt you if everyone’s dead or too scared to get near you… but nobody will hurt you if they don’t want to. I don’t know which view started off stronger, but I think it was the pessimistic side. S-...something happened to me, before all this, that stuck with me through the memory wipe. Something, or someone, did something horrible to me… and I’ll never know what or who, but that feeling of loss and pain lingered. It fed my distrust. If no one was allowed to get close, no one could hurt me like that ever again. You… made me realize I also would never recover like that. For a moment, all the pain went away, and that pessimistic side was at a loss. From that perspective, people couldn’t be good or bring good with them. You certainly weren’t good, but for some inexplicable reason, you cared. It honestly messed me up harder. From there, it was just the task of rebuilding myself as a joint effort. Both mindsets had value, both kept us safe, but they excel in different circumstances. It’s a work in progress, but I don’t wake up in agony anymore and I haven’t been stabbed in the back or left to die… not yet, anyway.” She doesn’t look at me throughout the entire monologue, and I’m more than content to listen. Not everything she says makes total sense to me, and I’m pretty sure her experience is different from mine, but there’s overlap. A lot of it.

“What was up with that hole in your chest? The one that ate all the Energy I threw at it?”

She eyes me carefully. “I never saw it, so I didn’t know it ever left.”

“The other day, I noticed it when I was healing you. Didn’t really get a chance to bring it up.”

She nods, seeming to accept that. “I don’t know for sure, you’re the expert on this kind of stuff, but I think the main thing that’s changed is that there aren’t the distinct mindsets as much anymore. I feel… cohesive. Whole.”

I definitely believe that being internally divided affects Energy; it really fucked up mine when Insanity and I were clashing. Technically my Energy still is fucked up, with Kaythe as the unfortunate casualty. That being said, there are, and probably were no holes of Energy within me, so what I’m experiencing is either less severe or… more severe. Maybe that endless hole of Energy wasn’t endless, and if I had kept feeding Energy into it… the separation would have been more distinct with Lauren, like with me. Was I borderline incapacitated for all that time after getting out of the Ferin city because my body was having all the Energy I produced siphoned into giving shape to Insanity? Was I just unconscious the entire time the Energy hole was present?

If so… why? Why didn’t Lauren get affected with weakness like I did? Why would I naturally facilitate breaking off a piece of myself and giving it an identity in the face of trauma? That seems dangerous. More likely to make the situation worse, like it did, than help. There are too many questions and very little in the way of answers, which bothers me immensely.

“We should head back.”

“Oh? Sure you don’t want to spend another few minutes brooding in the dark?”

“Jerk.” I say, smiling.

The small hike back to camp proves easy enough, especially with the destruction I left in my wake amounting to a relatively clear path back. Thetzeke pays no attention to me when I return, either pretending or continuing to sleep. It doesn’t matter. Cerberus inclines his head slightly before returning to his vigilance. I spread the light bedroll from my pack, arrange the pack so the softest part could almost be a pillow, and fall asleep without another thought.

---

Thetzeke continued to be short tempered well into the morning, which essentially amounted to me having a lot of time to think more about what to do about Insanity. Unfortunately, the immense concentration required to actually enact any of the partial ideas I manage to come up with prevents me from doing any more. I refuse to find a body for Insanity, especially one that gives me no way of reining him in… but he’s set on interacting with the world around me. If I could figure out a way to make the Sanctum look how I want, I could trick him- no, can’t do that. Ah! It’s so frustrating to suppress the urge to rip someone off. No wonder people really used to frown on haggling; with fixed prices and blameless cashiers, the customers were always ripped off and that’s just the way it was. Nobody to blame. Forge a deal in person, and if you can’t convince the other party that the deal was at least fair, you’ve got an issue.

And this ‘other party’ will know for sure.

My thoughts are rudely interrupted when the ground suddenly shudders, almost knocking me over out of sheer surprise. With my Dexterity, there’s little chance of actually falling if I’m remotely prepared, but tremors had never happened so far.

The shaking stops after only a moment, but all of us are on high alert trying to find the source. The tremor hits again, stronger this time, but despite casting around as much as I can with my enhanced senses, nothing stands out as a possible source.

I check a nearby tree for safety before jumping almost halfway to the top, shimmying the rest of the way there. A quick study of the ground reveals no obvious focal point for the tremors, and no real cracking of the terrain. Poking my head out of the canopy, I start to scan the surroundings only to nearly be shaken loose from the tree when the tremors continue.

“Thetzeke!” I call out, desperately clinging to the tree top that definitely can’t support my weight. “What the FUCK is doing that?!”

The words have barely left my mouth when I spot it. Not that it’s hard to spot a mountain standing up. Near the southern edge of the forest, where the foliage and trees slowly transitioned to high altitude scrub and loose rock, a mountain stands on its legs. As I watch, the last of the four colossal supports hits the ground, and the shockwave is clearly visible as it travels through the trees. A shuddering wave of leaves, startled birds, and misted water roll towards us. I only just manage to call out to everyone to brace before stoically clutching my tree myself.

“That is the Nihilith. It has woken.”

The ‘Nihilith’ looked only slightly remarkable as a mountain, in that it maintained verdant plantlife at a much higher altitude than the other mountains. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s easy to see how the trees are actually an entirely different species from what makes up most of the rest of the forest. In fact, the trees look a lot more like evergreens, than their flat-leaf counterparts of the forest proper. What appeared to be a nearby hill was actually its head. Now that it’s standing, it’s easy to tell that it has a long, flowing neck leading to… what looks like a giant mask. Most of its head is a dull gray, like stone, but that only serves to make the mask seem more out of place. The expression on the mask is something of a smile, but devoid of any of the more humanoid features I expect with a mask. Obviously an alien wouldn’t choose human features, but it does make the entire thing a lot more unnerving.

I really hope it’s not bent on destruction. I want to stay the fuck away from the moving mountain, thanks.