In terms of travel time and overall direction, Lairas thought that his journey was going exceedingly well. The sun was about to reach its peak, the sky was clear, and by his calculations, the road to Scant wasn’t far away.

In terms of actual survival, he admitted that things could have looked better.

It was just over a couple of days’ walk to Scant, and he was confident that he was on pace to arrive even quicker. But the loss of his food stash had hurt him more than he had liked - the yawning pit in his stomach had opened, and now every step brought a disturbing gurgle from his guts.

Slaughter’s comments, of course, weren’t helpful.

“... And obviously dripping with gravy,” the spirit mused, topping off a description of an extraordinarily decadent meal. “Then for dessert… hm. A trifle is my favourite, but I think a nice apple crumble would hit the spot right now - flaky pastry, juicy chunks of fruit… Ooh, or maybe something with chocolate? Melted, obviously, perhaps over some fried dough, with a light dusting of sugar - oh, have you ever had sjutri? It’s an absolute delicacy-”

Lairas came to a sudden halt, his mind made up.

He needed to eat.

Which meant he needed to catch something.

Which meant he needed to get control over the red haze of the spirit of Slaughter.

Which meant another visualisation exercise.

The notion of going through that again, however, was nearly enough to make him consider continuing on, hungry or not - but then another gurgle reminded him that he needed to keep his strength up. He needed to stay ahead of the Hunter spirits, or this whole endeavour was pointless.

“Oh, you want another try at me, fleshy?” Slaughter said, with a derisive snort. How it managed that without a nose, Lairas had no clue. Well- he had no real clue how the spirit talked at all - their voice seemed to just emanate from the red haze laden thick about his shoulders. “Try that trick again, see what happens.”

“What would happen?” Lairas asked, mostly just to keep the spirit talking.

“I’ve had time to prepare my selfhood,” the spirit replied, voice smug. “Consolidated my conceptual core to be impregnable. Next time you try that little visualisation exercise of yours, you’ll be trapped in visions of Slaughter for eternity.”

“Hm,” Lairas replied, pursing his lips slightly. “Well I’d hoped to save this for later, but I suppose if that’s a possibility…”

He reached into a pocket sewn onto the inside sleeve of his overcoat, and pulled out a single, pitch black sphere.

Slaughter was silent. Lairas allowed himself a victorious smile.

“Perhaps in order for this to work,” Lairas began, “you should stop underestimating me.”

“You think you’re so clever, mortal,” Slaughter said, voice harsh and cruel. “With your little pills, and your little gambles. But you need to beat me every single time- I only need to beat you once.”

“Your problem is that you come at everything from an adversarial position,” Lairas replied, unable to keep the smug smile from his voice. “If you started thinking of this as a partnership, if we started working together, then both our lives would be easier.”

“You talk to a spirit of Slaughter about life?” Slaughter replied, a sadistic laugh bubbling behind his words. “Mortal, you know nothing of-!”

Lairas sighed and popped the pill.

His grand escape from Wellspring Temple, and Wellspring Barrow as a whole, had not been a spur of the moment thing. His planning had been meticulous but flexible, and he’d planned farther ahead than simply the road to the next town.

The problem with spirits was the difficulty of integrating selfhoods, entangling conceptual cores and merging the spirit’s abilities into your own internal core. They were often older, their conceptual cores were far denser than mortals, and their selfhoods were far more developed, being devoted to a singular thing.

But imprisonment in a human body was their weakness. Suddenly they were vulnerable to the same biological ailments that humans were - factors that could affect the human mind could affect the spiritual core.

As an acolyte at the Wellspring Temple, Lairas had seen firsthand the effects that certain drugs could have on spirits - psychedelics especially could send their abilities haywire, activating randomly and lashing out at their surroundings or ensconcing their host in isolating bubbles.

The shamans had noticed, of course, that spiritual beings could be affected by entirely physical elements, and had gone to great pains to investigate the specifics of this relationship. Gradually, over decades of experimentation, they had developed the Grand Dilution Pill - a small, pitch-black sphere that temporarily weakened the spirit’s hold on their host’s body, allowing the host to progress their integration leaps and bounds in that short period.

It’s primary purpose was to break through conceptual blocks - if a spirit and their host’s conceptual cores were somewhat incompatible, then integration was difficult. The Grand Dilution Pill, however, did exactly as it was named - it diluted the spirit’s selfhood to allow more effective entanglement.

Lairas had seen it used effectively against hostile spirits to allow their hosts to develop a more dominant relationship with their spirit - the threat of more Pills was generally enough to quell their resistance.

He had only been able to steal the one pill, though, and even that had been the work of weeks of planning, and only possible because of his position within the Temple.

But if it couldn’t be used as a threat, then maybe it could give him an edge in the early part of their relationship.

“... object of power,” Slaughter had started mumbling, but its voice was nigh-incoherent now. “Pleasant existence… the world of forms is exponentially… barbaric processes… essential paradox of a spirit whose domain is death… greater and lesser factions within a larger paradigm…”

Lairas knelt down by a tree, folded his legs, then removed his overcoat and tied it around his mouth, working as much of the material into his jaws as he could. If there was even a small chance of Slaughter taking control of his vocal cords again, Lairas wanted to minimise the damage.

With that taken care of, he folded his arms behind his back and bent forward until his forehead touched his crossed ankles.

In his mind, the bubbling pool of blood was… thinner. Less viscous, certainly, and the bubbles were smaller and more infrequent, the blood itself lighter- almost translucent, in fact.

Hesitantly, Lairas approached - or rather, ‘visualised his selfhood approaching.’ The shamans were always very strict on terminology.

He pressed one hand into the pool of blood, and felt the tug of the visions pull at his conceptual core. He resisted, however, and pulled his hand back out. Like this, there was only really one way to visualise adding his selfhood to Slaughter’s.

Fortunately, there was already a knife visualised in his left hand.

Lairas raised it and looked at the thing for a moment. It was ostentatious, long and sharpened to a glistening edge. It looked… ceremonial.

Before he could lose confidence, Lairas pressed the edge into his palm and drew the blade downward, as swiftly as he could.

Almost instantly, a cascade of blood poured from the wound. Or- was it blood? The liquid that pulsed from his palm had the same consistency as blood, but it was a vibrant blue colour.

That… was not something Lairas had visualised. He tried not to think about what that might say about him.

His selfhood poured into Slaughter’s conceptual core - the now-pale pool of blood. The blue seemed to instantly drain away as it poured in, creating only momentary swirls of contrast in the red, but that was to be expected. This method was slower - safer, certainly, but unlikely to have as exaggerated an effect as his first attempt.

Unless… with Slaughter’s selfhood diluted this way, perhaps an intermediate approach was possible? Not submerging the entirety of his selfhood in the spirit’s but - perhaps a portion of it?

He raised the knife again, dug it into the wound created by the first cut, and gradually extended it further up his arm, halting only when the tip of the knife met his elbow.

There was no pain in this visualisation-space. The wound was only a metaphor for the merging of their conceptual cores, anyway - metaphors couldn’t cause pain.

His grisly task complete, he plunged his arm up to its elbow into the pool of blood, and then gasped.

Slaughter’s diluted selfhood mingled with his own and sent fragmentary visions searing through his mind. Splintered images impressed themselves upon his mind’s eye - snapshots of massacres, dozens of bodies piled high, festering wounds, wide and unblinking eyes.

He screwed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, but his physical body wasn’t really experiencing these things - his conceptual core was being battered by the sheer weight of Slaughter.

Then came a fragmented vision that lingered, momentarily.

It was… disorienting, in part because vision was a misnomer - this was more of an experience, a series of impressions and ideas that almost built a narrative.

Some kind of meeting had taken place- he caught notions of formality, equality, the airing of grievances. Then fury, growing among companions- before being stopped in its tracks by a greater authority.

Power squeezed his mind in a vice grip, sending flashing spots across his vision and lighting bolts of agony up his spine - so much for metaphors not causing pain. Then, just as suddenly, the grip on his mind released, followed by sorrow, shame… regret?

Someone, perhaps many someones, were… dead. Or, at the very least, something had changed, and he hated it.

But it was only the… outline, perhaps the idea of hatred - everything seemed to simply be its outline, lacking in substance. There was the idea of escape, the outline of self-flagellation - and then Lairas was yanked outward, pulled back into reality by some sudden force.

He floundered for a moment, barely conscious of where he was or what happening - and he couldn’t see.

“What- what in the heavens-?” Lairas gasped, pulling the coat away from his mouth.

“You pathetic… little… fleshy,” Slaughter replied, seeming to pant as it did so. “That little stunt… just cost you… eight hours!”

Lairas looked up to the sky - sure enough, there hung Illumina, the smallest but brightest of their three moons. His eyes, quickly adjusting to the darkness, cast about for his knapsack.

“How did you-?” Lairas said, gritting his teeth.

“I had already pre-consolidated my core, fleshy,” Slaughter said, voice delighted. “When I saw that silly little pill of yours, I simply tweaked my internals to dilate time for you.”

“But- that would mean-” Lairas shook his head. “That would give me subjective hours of integration. That would help me- and weaken you!”

“Mm, well,” Slaughter said, smug. “You aren’t the only one who can gamble.”

The Hunter spirits, Lairas realised. They’ll have closed the gap massively in that time!

With an enraged snarl, he threw on his coat.

The red haze helped, billowing out the sleeves and pulling it onto his arms. Lairas stilled as it did so, wary of a trick by Slaughter - but when the haze stilled as well.

He blinked in surprise, then focused on the haze - and tried to extrude one tendril.

It was sluggish, and barely-condensed - but it was obeying him.

Lairas only held back a whoop of delight because the situation was, all things considered, fairly dire. Also, Slaughter was listening, and he didn’t want to give the spirit any reason to comment.

Still, though - if Lairas was in control of the haze, that could only mean he’d broken through the First Threshold.

The First Threshold was simply the first stage in full integration - it gave Lairas control over the semi-real haze that spirits generated by their own conceptual weight, acting as a pseudo-limb. Further Thresholds would grant Lairas greater control over this haze, as well as access to more of Slaughter’s repertoire.

“I think you miscalculated, Slaughter,” Lairas replied, unable to keep the smug from his voice. He raised one fist, encasing it in haze and flexing out an approximation of a hand.

“Oh, I don’t think I di-iiiid~!” Slaughter replied in a sing-song voice.

Lairas frowned, then jumped as he heard a distant shout. Crouching, he cast his eyes about, looking for-

There. A pinprick of light, flickering as it crossed behind trees.

A torch.

Lairas cursed, seized up his knapsack, and sprinted towards the road to Scant.

The Hunters were here.

“Run, fleshy, run!” Slaughter chortled with joy. “Run like your pathetic little life depends on it!”

Lairas obeyed, if only because it did.