The pain was gone.

I was laying down on my back. Everything was dark. There was nothing but deep shadows.

Panic threatened to overwhelm me, but I pushed it down. I pushed myself up from the ground and looked around, only to find an abyss. Even beneath my feet, there was nothing. I was hovering in the darkness, standing on the absence of material. I took a single hesitant step forward, only to immediately retreat back when I found no change in scenery. Everything was dark. Not shadowed. I wasn’t in an isolated room. There was no wind, but the air felt fresh. I was outside. The sky was simply empty. No stars glittered above, and no sun chased away the empty space they left behind. Darkness was all there was.

Then there was something. A light. Just the tiniest speck, little more than the lightning bugs that swarmed the forests at night, but I held unto it like it was my savior. I ran towards it with all I had, all hesitance eked from my step as desperation took the reins. The light slowly increased in size as I approached it, from a dot to a plate. Then its source came into view. A lamppost, pointing downwards, illuminating a small circular area with a chair in its center. On the chair was a letter with a gold, vaguely round shape in its center, like a circle that had been dragged out. A wax seal.

I moved slowly towards it, the strange sight filling me with suspicion and replacing my desperation with caution. Nothing happened as I closed in on it. I stood right in front of the chair now and stared at the letter with suspicion. I remember having briefly read about something like this in Lucifer’s tome. It was a trap, much like when Anthony had forced me to shake his hand, though this was far less coercive in its nature. I inspected the letter from as far away I could, though I still had to be only a few steps away.

The seal pictured an eight-pointed star with a perfect circle in its center. The inner-circle was lined with tiny triangles, more than twenty at the very least. It almost looked like a mouth-

A sound rang out through the darkness. Just a single step of a foot lightly hitting the gravel hidden beneath the darkness, but when nothing else was here it stood out like the screeching of a babe. I twisted around from the chair towards the source but could see nothing in the deep abyss that surrounded me. I watched it with suspicion for a moment.

“I wouldn’t look at it for too long,” said a voice over my shoulder. I turned with my elbow leading, only for it to meet nothing but air.

“It holds quite a lot more than you think. More than I think you are ready for,” The voice continued undisturbedly from a different position. I turned to its new origin and found a very tall man standing behind the chair. His skin was covered in a pale paste of some sort, though I could not get even a glimpse of his actual skin underneath. He wore a well-trimmed goatee of black and long oily locks of unruly hair hung from his head. His eyes were white, marking him as human, but the irises were quite strange indeed, their color a vibrant purple. His eyelids and lips were painted black rather than white, with each of his cheeks being decorated with a three-pointed star of the same color. He wore a triple cape jacket of shimmering dark purple color that reached to the middle of his shins, with a white cravat sticking out.

“Darkness tends to be comforting for beings that the light wish harm,” He explained. His voice was surprisingly light. Not at all what I was expecting of the humongous man that stood before me. “None so more than me.”

I recognized him. This wasn’t like a vague memory or anything of the sort. I was certain I knew his face. Those eyes pulled at my memory like my life depended on it.

“Ah, yes, I plucked those pesky thoughts from you when you entered here,” the man told me, having apparently read my mind. “Your opinion of me isn’t very favorable, and I figured that it would’ve made this entire conversation rather unproductive.”

“What do you want?” I asked warily. For all the trouble I went through to get a mind protection spell going, it sure was unhelpful.

“Straight to the point?” He asked, sounding mildly offended. “I think not. That would undermine my entire reason for pulling you here! As for your protection spell, it works quite well actually, especially considering how crudely it was made. It just can’t protect you from me, since I am already inside it. In fact, I’ve been here longer than you.”

What does he mean here?

“We are inside your mind obviously,” Jonathan said with a grin, revealing rotting yellow teeth. “Or, more accurately, we are in my part of your mind. The little corner I managed to seize while you were still a babe. It was quite the ordeal, I can tell you that much. All those priests milling about, it wasn’t easy mustering any of my magic to use without having us both burned at the stake. But I succeeded, obviously, and I used that space to make myself a little sanctum. This place.”

“It seems… empty,” I commented absentmindedly. This was what he found comforting?

“Well, it wasn’t like I had much to work with,” he sounded honestly insulted for once. “I’m not insulted! You are just being incredibly insensitive right now! Your entire life I’ve been working on preserving this place, for this exact moment, and you just think about how comfy it looks!”

“I’m sorry?” I told him hesitantly. “What do you mean ‘this exact moment’? Why do you need to preserve it?”

“Okay, so that was an exaggeration,” he instantly confessed. “I didn’t mean it like ‘this exact point in time’ but more like a ‘when we were able to meet’ kind of thing. I also only spent about ten minutes on this place, so it shouldn’t be a surprise it is crumbling. I really just needed a place to sit and some paper to keep my knowledge in. And, if your soul wasn’t so damn greedy, I wouldn’t have needed even that!” He shouted it upwards with a fist raised in the air like he was challenging a god. “I might as well be! This place has been on the rocks ever since you woke up your magic! Before that, it would just grab the odd memory spot here and there, but now it’s leaching my magic! And what the hell is it with this shitty familiar contract? You used this much magic for what is essentially a partnership? My buddy managed to get the king of pride, not even some silly 9th tier, to serve him unconditionally for half of that! I’ve razed cities with less!”

“But the book said-“ Did he just say he had razed cities? Who the hell was this guy?

“The book that was written by an infernal? Oh, geez. Wonder why that guy would want you to spend more magic than you need? Why do you even need that stupid tome? It won’t be long before your soul just gobbles up what is left of this place.”

His knowledge? “Why would your knowledge make up for the tome’s?”

“You sure do ask a lot of questions, don’t you? Have you considered shutting up!” He roared out the last part, though it sounded more like a harsh whisper that was somehow deafening as well.

“I’ll get to it!” he continued. “I had this entire monologue prepared, and you just ruined the entire thing! Okay, whatever.” He took a deep breath. “In short, what I want you to do is simple. Free me. All you need to do is find a vessel without a soul in it. Any recently dead person will do. Age or mobility is irrelevant, I can fix basically anything. Why would you do this, you ask? Well, I’m glad you asked the exact question I wanted and not anything else. The reason why you are just as, if not more, interested in getting me out of here is that your soul is at stake too!”

I almost opened my mouth to ask how, but his glare made it very clear how good of an idea that was.

“You see, souls are like zombies in a lot of ways,” he continued, his voice getting more deranged as he went on, switching between tones like a songbird but with a deep baritone instead of light fluttering. “They really don’t have a problem with slapping extra parts on if the end result is still maneuverable. they adapt to new parts easily. So, you won’t get just my knowledge, you’ll be getting me. Every part of me. And I promise you, Jakey boy, that is not something you want. I’ve lived for long enough to meet the founders of Timoria. I didn’t just survive the purges, I’m the reason they had them. People still speak of me like they do your emperor, but with fear instead of awe, even fifty years past my death.”

Shit. There’s the memory. The boogeyman of Timoria.

“We may end up the same person, but it’ll be a lot more of me than you in there-”

I didn’t hear the rest, already running as fast as I could into the darkness. Rather be lost than captured here with him. But destiny didn’t seem to agree, as The Whisperer appeared before me, his eyes illuminated intensely in an almost blinding display.

“Oh, poor Jacob,” he said, sounding genuinely remorseful. “This could have gone so much easier. Now you need to figure out how to get out of here when I could have just let you out.”

“I’m never letting you back in the world!” I remembered the haunted look my father would get when he spoke of grandfather. Of all the monsters this imitation of a man created. Of the madness and fear he spread.

“Then you will become me,” he told me sadly. “I wonder what they will call you? I was The Whisperer, but all I did was a little illusion magic. But if I had that book back then… I’d have turned the world to ashes. Maybe that’s what they’ll call you. Jacob, King of Ashes.”

“Shut up!” I shouted at him.

“Or what?” He laughed, mirth in his tone. “You are so afraid of me, you can barely stand upright. If you were capable of it, you’d probably have passed out by now. What could you possibly do?”

I… I looked down and saw that I was indeed shaking. I closed my eyes, trying my best to ignore him. He was an illusionist, right? There wasn’t much he could do to me either.

“But you forget, Jacob,” he scolded clearly despite my efforts to tune him out. “This is my world.”

I was blasted backward, something incredibly heavy having slammed against my chest. I flew for what seemed like an eternity, everything moving at a tenth pace. I tried to draw in my magic, and I felt it, not inside me but outside, surrounding this bubble of darkness. It couldn’t pierce it though. I pulled and I pulled, but I couldn’t get any through.

Then I hit something. It hurt, but I didn’t feel anything afterward, like the damage wasn’t real. I looked over my shoulder and saw what I had hit. It was the lamppost, unbent by the impact.

“How is the state of our kind these days?” he tried to negotiate. “Let me back out and I can lead to glory. I can make us kings again.”

I remained silent. Speaking would be futile, anyway. I simply remained sitting with closed eyes.

“Speaking is never futile, Jacob. Tell me, what do you want? More than anything else?”

“Why?” I asked with mild frustration in my tone at not being able to tune him out. His voice was just so piercing. “Will you give it to me if I let you out? Will I get all my dreams fulfilled if I just let you destroy the world?”

“No, nothing like that,” he dismissed. “I’ll teach you. Whatever you want to know. Demonology was always my weak point, but you have that covered already. But what about the mind arts? You complained about your shield earlier. I could make you the greatest telepath who ever walked the earth. What about protection? Didn’t you end up here because you couldn’t protect yourself from Anthony? I could make you able to wipe out cities with a wave of your hand. With your capabilities for magic, there is so little you couldn’t do with the right guidance.”

I remained quiet.

“No? What about peace then?” He smiled slightly at my unwilling shiver. “The entire world, Jacob. It’ll all be at peace under me. No one will ever bother you. Dalton will be your own little sanctuary. No knights of Ilos, no demons, no sorcerers. Just you, your family, and the good, innocent people of your town. What do you say?”

I opened my eyes and found a hand there, just begging to be taken.