A massive blow rocked her headspace, slamming her into the ground with a screaming headache. Her claw shattered into shards and blobs of luminescent goop, the second hand falling to her headspace’s floor not a moment later. She screamed and clutched the sides of her head, pulling her knees to her chest to make herself small while her mind imploded with searing agony. Tears flowed freely down her cheeks as Ensche rained blows down on her headspace, falling as constant as raindrops with the impact of a rockslide, her mind retreating further and further inwards to try to escape from the pain that threatened everything she was. And yet not a single blow struck her person. She remained perfectly unharmed, save for the mental anguish. Then the vertigo and the constant sense of unease piled on even further, calling for her to give up and retreat from her headspace.

Sechen would have gasped with realization if her teeth weren’t cutting into her lips. That was what Ensche wanted; the only place she could exist. But she wasn’t willing to share, as was made obvious by all the attempts she’d made over the years to better herself. Sechen cracked one eye open to try and get a sense of the destruction that surrounded her, finding shards of stone being whipped around by Ensche’s sudden mastery over air and earth. Nothing remained of the ruins, a blank transparent floor under Sechen’s cheek reminding her that this wasn’t like the outside world. The colossus’ chest opened up into a maw filled with shard-like teeth, grinding anything that was swept into it into a fine dust that joined the deadly storm that passed harmlessly over Sechen. And harmlessly over the golden flower.

She blinked, raising her manifested arm to rub her eyes as she didn’t believe what she saw. The shards passed harmlessly through the flower, not so much as rustling the golden leaves as the plant stood firm. Sechen looked blankly at her hand, her mind not registering that she’d moved without any sort of pain, yet the flower stood as if in a spotlight. All she could register was the gold. The ever consuming greed that now lived in her, a parasite that asked for nothing and gave unknowable benefits in return. She reached for the gold that she knew had to be somewhere in her system, feeling that endless pit of consumption resting right next to her container. How it had managed to avoid her gaze she didn’t know, but she let it in. It fizzled and bled into her conscious mind, accenting the three halos of her container with gold, cementing them in her mind as connected to her manifested arm. Her fingers twitched with the desire to move, golden claws dripping murky light hovering just above her fingernails as her halos glowed with subtle power.

Her mind was still a blur, but she pushed herself to her feet, her eyes piercing the yawning maw of the colossus and saw through to the truth. Ensche. She wasn’t powerful. She didn’t control stone, air, or much of anything. She was a stowaway in Sechen’s mind, a parasite that granted her nothing. A parasite that ripped away at her future with subtle jabs to her past. Hatred sparked from the gold, a feeling that Sechen couldn’t quite explain, and she raised her manifested hand up and to the right. As she brought it down, Ensche’s control came with it.

“What?” Ensche stated dumbly as her world suddenly vanished. She looked around at the blank space around her, eventually settling on the third inhabitant of Sechen’s headspace; the golden flower. “What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY HEADSPACE?”

Ensche charged Sechen with a screaming sob, throwing a weak punch that impacted harmlessly against her stomach. Sechen started down at the skeletal fist and tried to summon the pity she knew she should feel for this girl. It never came. And hatred blossomed in its place.

“The same thing you tried to do to me, all the way back then.” Sechen said, pushing Ensche’s fist away and sending her tumbling back. Pathetic. “Scoured it clean, so I can start building it up right.”

“It doesn’t work that way! Please! Give me back control!” Ensche pleaded desperately. “We’ll both die if it stays like this!”

Sechen didn’t understand what Ensche was getting at until she glimpsed down at her container. It was slowly unraveling, letting all of her Issi out into the void where it existed. “Because I’m not a wisp anymore, so there’s nothing to keep the Issi in me. How were you holding this back?”

“Like I’d tell you.” Ensche snorted. “You’d just kill us and do everything yourself.”

Sechen took one step forward. Ensche flinched away at her intensity, but quickly recovered. “I am not you, Ensche. And I’m sick of acting like I’m the only monster here. If you’d had a little more power, or if I’d been a little weaker back then, our places would be reversed. No; that isn’t quite right, is it?” Sechen closed the distance, leaning over Ensche with what she hoped was an intimidating stare. “If you’d won, I’d be gone. Completely and utterly, so you could go off and fight Glasrime or Lavassil with your little cult. So, tell me why I shouldn’t let you burn out along with this place. I’m feeling… generous.”

“Fuck you, you monster. We are not the same. And I am not worse than you.” Ensche spat, turning away. “Go and live the few hours you’ve got before death takes you. I’ll be there to step into the hollow husk you leave behind.”

“Well, I gave you a chance.” Sechen shrugged, surging forward and plunging her clawed fingers deep into Ensche’s chest. Ensche looked down in horror at the grisly sight, hands clawing uselessly at Sechen’s forearm as babbling nothing sprayed forth from her gaping mouth along with all her lifeblood. She ripped her arm clear and flicked off Ensche’s blood, a feeling of utter relief swooping in to fill the void that was left by her Issi. It almost felt anticlimactic.

Ensche was gone, and Sechen remained.

A somber smile lit her lips as she strode through the dust that had been Ensche, bending down and tenderly caressing the bizarre bloom that was the only remnant of her headspace. She grasped the outermost halo with both hands, bending down so her face was perfectly in line with the floor as everything collapsed around her. The gold didn’t nip out at her this time, which she took as a sign of just how badly she was hurting. She could have sworn she felt wistfulness in place of the gold’s greed, but a simple creation like it didn’t have the capacity for emotions.

She let her hands fall to the ground, feeling her place in her headspace slowly disintegrating away into nothing. She’d beaten Ensche, finally taken what she’d won years ago, and now she was going to die.

“Why in the hells did I just do that.” Sechen laughed, all feeling leaving her arms as her hands turned to dust. “I just killed myself for nothing.”

Sechen opened her eyes to what she thought was the end of her world. Everything bled together into a colourful blur, devouring any hope she might have had that what had just happened was a bad dream. She tried to call on her Issi, but it was like trying to catch water with a net. She pushed herself to her feet with far less effort than she’d expected, her vision suddenly popping back into clarity. Yet she felt nothing where her container should have been. It was gone, plain and simple. She was no longer a practitioner. An inspection of her right arm showed it to still somehow work, even without Issi, the golden accents now covering a lack of Issi. Her reflection showed that her eyes had lost their glimmer, along with her hair, and now looked like any normal person who didn’t have a bond. White whites, brown irises, and blonde hair. She truly looked nothing like the person she’d been weeks ago.

“Back to square one, I guess.” Sechen muttered, pulling the skin under her eye to get a good look at the fleshy red underneath. “At least I’m not dead… because the Gilded Night’s keeping me from snapping to the other side of the veil. Shit.”

She ran her nails down the golden accents on her right arm, feeling nothing from them whatsoever. No nipping, no sorrow, no Issi. She realized that she couldn’t remember ever living without at least somewhat feeling Issi, so the quiet of the cabin was unnerving to say the least. A step towards the door left her muscles straining under the effort, letting her know that she’d been tensing them for as long as she’d been in her headspace, but she powered on. This was her life now, and she had to get used to it. Maybe she could get one of those temporary wisps and a bond with Vault so she wouldn’t be useless forever.

Her hand gripped the doorknob and twisted, but the metal didn’t budge. It held fast under her palm, not giving so much as an inch as she pulled and strained, far more than it should have even if it had been locked. No, this was something else entirely. She looked down to see if Thana had done anything to it and froze. The doorknob, and a good five inch circle around it, shimmered and gleamed like gold. And two thin, almost imperceptible strands connected her right hand to it.

“Shit. Shit, shit.” Sechen panicked, pulling her hand back to try and snap the threads. Not only did they hold fast, but they more than doubled in size and began to drip liquid light that looked like her Issi. With a jolt she was pulled back towards the door, her hand forcefully clasped around the knob as the golden threads began spinning themselves up her arm. “What in the hells is happening!?”

She desperately tried to remove her arm as the threads spun towards her elbow, but without Issi it seemed as if she’d lost that particular ability of her manifestation. “No! Eternals, help me!” She screamed as the threads inched towards her neck, straining her neck to get as far away from them as possible. “THANA! WIX! MARCELLO! ANYONE! HELP!”

“Hush, little one.” Whispered a calming voice, gently caressing her mind with its words. “Calm yourself. Neither of us wish to fall so far back, so listen to my words and make your own judgments.”

Sechen wanted to scream, but her throat stayed quiet. Her heart told her she could trust this voice, but her mind told her to get as far away as possible. Even if it killed her. With a shake of her head, she stopped listening to her head. She would never tell herself to die.

“Good. You seem to have realized what is happening to you.” The voice cooed, wrapping itself around Sechen like a warm blanket. “You have won. Utterly and completely, and yet your opponent is not graceful in defeat. She is trying to take you down with her, planted in your subconscious forevermore. Your thoughts will not be your own. I can make them… quiet.”

Her mind screamed at her to shake off this new voice, that it was all a trap, that this was actually her speaking and this new invader was actually Ensche’s last gasp. She strained against whatever was keeping her silent and choked out a few words. “Who are you?”

“A parasite.” The voice whispered, wrapping itself around Sechen’s mind one last time as satisfaction rippled across every fiber of her being. “A greedy, hungry parasite who can be…” Sechen felt the voice smile, wide and with teeth that would bite deep into reality to leave its mark. “Beneficial to my host.”

“Kill it.” Sechen decreed.