The heart of the Core’s lair, its inner sanctum, was a mess of bones and flesh and stone. Corpse after corpse covered the floor in varying states of decay, the amassed flesh broken up by giant stalagmites that both ringed the cavern and sometimes cut through it. The massive pillars of stone were like buttresses for the bodies that surrounded them, allowing the unmoving corpses to rise up against their sides in piles of meat and sinew and bone. Purple-black light and wisping smoke spilled from the gaps between the greatest of the gathered corpses, the majority of the light only noticeable due to the odd way that it intermingled with the wisping smoke and the shadows beneath them.

The greatest source of the light, however, was something else.

The Core. It rested on a pedestal near the back of the cavern, the path to it blocked by the combination of stone and massed flesh. More than most Cores, it looked evil; the light that it gave off was closer to a black than anything else, flecked by shades of purple that provided bare amounts of contrast. It warred with the more gentle light given off by the Seekers’ mana-infused armor, and that was the place where it was most visible. And, though the Core’s light was significantly stronger, its coloration was a near-perfect match for the bits of light that flowed between the gaps in the corpses, something that made Erik wary. That light was coming from a different direction. There was something underneath. Many somethings, it seemed.

The Little Guardian let out a baleful hiss, the sound garbled and muffled by his own tail. Valera made a light shush, gently warning the angry snake to keep quiet. Even that was loud within the cavern, echoing off of the walls before breaking itself against the piles of dead like waves against a shoreline.

Erik raised his shield, careful to keep it between himself and the nearest of the motionless corpses. Corpses that, from what he’d seen, should have been moving. They weren’t.

Which meant something had changed.

Even more, Erik could already tell that something was missing. Something that all Cores tended to have, especially the more dangerous ones. The ones that had already established themselves, like this one clearly had. His eyes darted around the cavern, soaking in the sights, vision trying to seep through the gaps of piled flesh. There was nothing but the light, and the smoke, and motionless bodies.

Nothing to do but keep going.

He stepped forward, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Erik hid within the shadows of the doorway, six-year-old body doing all that it could to meld into the darkness. The boy was slight, still, even if he was bigger than many of the children his own age. Small enough that he could easily curl himself away near the bottom of the door's frame, head peeking out from below as he checked for danger. Nothing there; just a set of chairs, two bodies, a set of empty bottles, and eyes blessedly looking elsewhere.

He crept forward on hands and knees, ponderously slow. Words, slightly slurred and overloud, covered his approach. Kept him safe, even as he made his way across the room, even as his heart raced in his chest, sounding like a thousand thundering drums. Kept him -

The words cut off, and the floor creaked.

"Erik?" one of the voices asked. "Is that you?"

He froze mid-crawl, one hand still in the midst of reaching forward, as if remaining motionless would keep him from being found. It didn't.

"What are you doing up?" the other voice asked. His mother had turned to look at him in disapproval, lips twisting sternly. Erik flinched. He wasn't supposed to be awake. Wasn't supposed to be listening. Not to stories like these. The ones that his father told sometimes when he had too much to drink. About the people he had lost, and the ways he had lost them. They weren't happy stories, not like the ones that his parents told him before he slept at night; sometimes they made it so that he couldn't sleep.

But he couldn't help it. Scary as they sometimes were, they were also fascinating to his young mind, filled with magic and wonder and adventure - and, yes, absolutely, bone-crushing horror - far beyond Erik could imagine for himself. Most of the other kids his age didn't like to think about those things; they wanted to follow in the steps of their parents, to stay in Orken where it was safe and the monsters and Cores and other terrible things would never reach them. Erik wasn't like them. Or maybe he was.

He wanted to follow in his parents' footsteps, too. It was just that one of those parents had walked a very different path than most.

"I was just listening," he finally said. Reluctant to admit it, but with no other option. He stood up, brushing off dust from his knees, and braved a few steps closer before they could respond. Advancing on the enemy before they could recover from his ambush. That sort of thing seemed important in the stories. His legs wobbled a bit, and he realized that it was harder than his father had made it sound. Moving forward when you were scared.

He did it, though, making it all the way to the enemy's inner sanctum, though he wasn't sure what those words exactly meant. He just knew that it was the place where a Core's power was strongest in the stories. Where they could twist the world to their will in ways that the boy always struggled to imagine.

He sat down, and his mother wrapped her arms around him, chin pressed against the top of his head. A chill ran down his spine when she squeezed tight, and the boy could only imagine that this was what it felt like to have a Core's power pressing down upon him.

Suffocating. Inescapable.

She turned him around, and he found himself staring into his mother’s eyes. They glinted like steel, and he held back a gulp.

“Sweetie, you’re too young to hear things like this, especially before bed. It’ll give you nightmares.”

Before everything could go wrong, he unsheathed his secret weapon. His lips wobbled. Like a sword formed of the edge-sharpening Earth mana that Orken held so dear, it cut through his mother's defenses. Her grip wavered.

She crumbled.

Sighing, Erik’s mother leaned in his father’s direction, placing her head atop his shoulder and speaking quietly into his ear. Not so quietly that Erik didn’t manage to pick it up, though, ears straining to catch every word.

“I guess it’s fine to keep going, just…nothing too graphic, please. I don’t want to have him waking up in the middle of the night for the next few weeks.”

Erik’s wobbling lips twisted into a wide grin, his objective achieved. Story time! And he didn’t even need to hide in order to listen!

Unfortunately, it turned out that wasn’t quite the same. His father’s stories were normally much darker, much more dangerous. With monsters and evil and fighting and even - sometimes, when he was really sad - dying. There wasn’t any of that this time; the monsters were weak, the fighting was safe, and nobody ever lost. And while that was exciting - because what child didn’t love to hear stories where the hero won? - Erik knew that it wasn’t true. He had listened to the real stories already. They didn’t always end in a happily ever after.

At least that meant that he knew which ones to ask for.

His earlier thoughts on the danger found in Core’s inner sanctums quickly led to a series of stories about ones that his father had found in his life. An Ice Aspect Core, where his breath had fogged the air and a giant made of ice had blocked their path. An Air Aspect Core, where every other step threatened to send him flying upwards on invisible pillars of wind, with a powerful winged monster ready to swoop in and take advantage. A Water Aspect Core, surrounded entirely by mana-water. They failed to reach that one, unable to reach it, let alone fight its strongest defender.

And that was something that they all had, in the stories. A powerful defender, one stronger than all the other monsters that the Core had created.

A final defense, one that often took everything the invading Seekers had to defeat.

By the time that the stories were over, the boy’s eyes had already begun to droop in exhaustion. The excitement had been too much. Still, there was something that he couldn’t help but ask.

“Can you…can you teach me to be like you? So that I can be in the stories, too?”

His mother and father shared a look. A long one, filled with meaning that the boy couldn’t understand. Finally, they both sighed.

“If that’s what you want, son,” his father replied, face filled with worry. “I wouldn’t be able to stop you from doing what you want when you’re older, anyway. But I won’t be satisfied until you’re strong enough to shrug off a blow from some of the strongest monsters in the stories I’ve told you. Your mother would toss me in the null-water if I let you get hurt when you didn’t have to.”

When he looked back, the boy was already asleep, a smile on his face.

As Erik stepped forward, the light spilling from between piled corpses surged. The bodies twitched. Melted into one another, flesh spilling into flesh until a single creature remained.

It was an amalgamation of flesh and bone, fashioned from a wide variety of disparate corpses. At each of its joints were glowing crystals, emitting a light that caused the flesh around it to warp and stick together, becoming closer in appearance to an actual creature’s flesh and muscle than it was anywhere else. As the light traveled onward and weakened, the nature of the corpses that formed its body began to become more obvious; strange, but not necessarily less deadly. Heads and limbs randomly jutted from the edges of its flesh, many of them tangled up with one another - but enough able to move freely that it would be hard to get past their defenses. Each of its many limbs were capped with a wolf-like corpse, their legs slipping about while their teeth snapped and snarled at the air.

Ah, there it is, Erik thought. The Core’s defender. At least that mystery’s solved now.

He was starting to wish that it hadn’t been. This was going to hurt. Badly.