The ethereal claw sank into his body. A chill shot through his channels, followed by a ripping pain in his head which made everything go black.

When he opened his eyes again, he was not chained to an altar, but in an alien land which he had never seen before, yet felt strangely familiar. Dirty brown mud stretched out as far as he could see. Throughout this mire grew strange snot-green roots, hollow and pierced through with holes. Roots twisting through the mud, that was everything this world had to offer him. He wondered where he had seen this place before.

He tried to move, but found that a thick root wrapped around the entirety of his right leg. His eyes followed the root all the way down to his feet, only to find that the root merged into an even larger one upon which he stood. This root was the size of a small hill, easily the largest one in this mire, rising out of and sinking back into the brown, like a gnarly tree root. Torn roots, much like the one binding his leg, lay next to a human-shaped imprint on the surface of this large one. These roots, he could see, had once bound his entire body against the ground. But they had been utterly destroyed, ripped apart and burned. The singular remaining root around his right leg looked as if it had suffered similar abuse, and was on the verge of withering away.

He saw this, and the mud beneath him churned. The entire world began to shiver, like the waves of a stormy sea. Gray pus oozed out from the holes in the hollow roots, dripping onto the mud to form disgusting, foggy puddles.

The spirit, Solera realized. He did not know where he was, but the spirit had followed him here! It would chase him down and possess him! He tried to tug his foot free, but it was to no avail. The root, old and decrepit as it was, would not budge!

One of the smaller roots, which had swelled to a great degree, burst apart and released copious amounts of gray liquid. The puddles bubbled, and then rose up, forming into grotesque monsters whose form defied physical comprehension. One was a ball of wings, its tail lashing the ground. Another was a gaping mass of incisors, with an eyeball in the center of every tooth. Every single one began to crawl, slither, and roll towards him.

Solera’s attempts to free himself became more frantic as he looked around himself. In every direction he looked, he could see the spirits coming for him, and more poured out from every snot-green root he could see. They would devour him, he knew. Devour him here, where he was trapped. Trapped by this root, here in this muddy marsh, only capable of awaiting his death!

As if in response to his emotions, the mud around him churned all the more madly. The gray monsters snarled, yipped, yowled, screamed as the mud underneath them swirled, consuming several of the absurd creatures.

As if in response to his emotions… Solera’s eyes widened, as his surroundings familiarity became clear to him. He had seen this place before, vaguely, as if through a foggy mirror. Years ago, when he first tried to channel, he had had a splitting headache and vision, where he was bound, here upon this same root. And when he had practiced his circulation mantra when he was on the prison march, he had discovered a giant node of light, one which, he finally remembered, was brown… He had seen, at that time, his soul.

And this was the very soul he stood upon now. The mud was no mud, but rather a mass of power; it was his Lake! And those green roots, those were his channels! The root binding him was not trapping him. It was a part of him. This entire world was a part of him!

“This… this is my soul.” Solera repeated to himself, his eyes wide with realization. Faintly, he could see the real world, a ghost image under the image of this brown mire. But right now, it was not the real world that mattered. It was the battle in his mind, the imminent fight with this spirit for control of his body!

“This is MY domain!” Solera screamed, clearing all other thoughts from his mind. “Get OUT!”

His Lake echoed him, the mud rising up like a tidal wave and burying the monsters deep beneath the surface. The roots trembled, then sunk into the mud. Steam billowed from the ground and into the sky.

Solera concentrated further, and from the mud rose hands which dragged more monsters into the mire. Geysers of silt erupted into the air, showering the invaders with the muck. Whenever the mud splashed against the creatures of gray, both fizzled and turned into steam.

Even as gray holes bubbled to the surface of the brown mud wherever the roots had been previously, the skies above crackled. Far, far above the raging battlefield, Solera could see an ocean of gray descending. He gritted his teeth and looked down again.

The gray liquid spewing out of his channels had burned away all the mud which had enveloped them and shapeshifted into a new army of monstrosities. Where there had been hundreds, there were now hundreds of thousands.

Solera raised his hands into the air, his lips contorted into a snarl. A tremor ran through the world, and then every single monster was pulled into the bog. Plumes of steam billowed from the marsh, and the very ground itself sunk down slightly, revealing parts of every root which had previously been submerged in mud.

Realization dawned on Solera as he saw his Lake receding. He had destroyed all these spirits by dissolving them with his own power, but he had expended precious resources by doing so; the dissolution meant trading one Iota of his own power for one Iota of the enemy’s, turning the fight into a war of attrition. A war he could not win, as the gray ocean loomed above him, already far larger than the entirety of his Lake. And already, the swamp was again covered with new monsters.

Solera snarled. The mud around him swelled upwards, forming into a hill with two massive arms, much like the upper half of a Vigor. He brought the fists down upon the ground, crushing a swathe of spirits into paste which harmlessly melted into his own Lake.

He swept his hand, creating a frame of destruction which took up half his entire vision. In response, the spirits merged together, turning into a haphazard mess of tentacles, mandibles, and claws. Solera clapped his Vigor’s hands around this giant, but the hands were slashed through, creating a cloud of steam as the mud sloughed onto the ground in great chunks.

Solera withdrew his arms, reforming his destroyed fists. The monster had made its body hard, so it could slice through his Vigor. Then… why couldn’t he do the same?

The Vigor balled its hands into fists, but it could go no further. Narrowing his eyes, Solera concentrated some more. The mud tightened a little bit, become a tiny bit denser. He screamed, and the mud squeezed down on itself, turning, for an instant, into a rock. He brought the fist down on the giant, sending gray liquid spraying everywhere. Gasping, Solera let the rocks crumble back into mud, and swept at a new horde of monsters behind him.

The struggle for Solera’s soul went on desperately. The obliteration of one wave of monsters only heralded the emergence of another, their bodies clashing with the mud to become vapor with every step they took. And in the skies above, the gray ocean’s shape had changed, turning into a gleaming hand, with three sharp claws. Unlike the gray creatures, which were like liquid once destroyed or Solera’s mud golem, the tip of every claw was razor sharp, undoubtedly as solid as steel.

The hand reached Solera’s land, its claw grabbing at Solera, still atop his Vigor. With a thought, he sunk deep underground. The claw grabbed the Vigor and crushed it into juice before evaporating it into vapor, but Solera had already escaped. With some shock, he realized he could still see everything, as if the mud was partly transparent. The claw rose up, then dug back into the mud. The fingers flicked open, sending giant chunks of brown spraying into the sky. They hurtled away, their speed not slowing in the slightest. The claws dug in again, in preparation to dislodge another chunk of Solera’s Lake.

“AHHHHH!” Solera howled in pain as he forced the ground around the claws to tighten. The hand behind the claws quivered for a moment as it struggled to open its fingers. Then, needle like threads shot out at odd angles, digging deep into the mud, like shovels tilling soil. Brown mud erupted into the air as the threads pulled upwards.

The claws ripped out another glob of mud and threw it away to reveal a tangled mess of roots, all of them still spewing out gray liquid. Solera’s foot, still chained to the root, was revealed for an instant. But the instant was enough. The claw snatched towards Solera, pulling up the entire root along with him. It grabbed at his leg, effortlessly ripping apart the final root binding him. He kicked out, breaking free from the root and rolling back into the mud, where he disappeared. It was completely like fighting a Vigor, Solera realized. The claw was trying to find the talisman which controlled the body-- him!

But he was at a total loss here, completely unable to resist this demonic claw, which carved out another hill of mud, tossing it into the air, where it drifted away. Solera stared at the disappearing blob, his eyes downcast. It had taken every fiber of his concentration to make a rock for an instant. How could he possibly stand against this juggernaut of metal?

It was only a matter of time. If the claw dug out every single bit of mud, then there would be nowhere left to run. His soul would be extinguished, and his body would be stolen away by this vicious Sky spirit. Was this the feeling that man, the one who had become Umbra, had felt?

Death by possession was a cruel fate, Solera bitterly realized. His soul would die, but his body would live on, taken by the thing that had killed him. And, of course, there was no rebirth when the soul could not pass through the rift. He would become nothing, like Guinness had.

He didn’t want to become nothing. He really, really didn’t want to become nothing. He would do anything, anything to escape this fate! There had to be a way! Solera, submerged deep underneath the surface of his Lake, used the Lake itself to see the claw, which relentlessly dug in search of him. He used the channels to look within himself, at the flood of gray power pouring into his body. And then he saw it. Of course. How could he have forgotten?

The power crystal!

A deep rumbling sound emitted throughout Solera’s soul. The claw paused for an instant, then resumed its tunneling. His channels bulged, then erupted with steam. The flow of gray was replaced by a deluge of verdant green which in under the span of a second had covered the entire world. With a single thought, the mud in which the claw was buried constricted, even as the green waters buffeted the hand. Gargantuan amounts of steam rose into the sky as the green dissolved gray.

Solera shot out of his hiding place, the green waters in the palm of his hands forming into a semisolid spear. He slashed away at the gray mud of the hand in search of the soul he knew was within, for he knew that if he had a soul the spirit was looking for, then the spirit in turn had a soul he needed to look for.

A bulge moved upwards from one of the fingers, upwards towards the surface of the green lake. Solera followed it, his eyes narrowed. This was the most critical battle of his life, the battle for control of his own body! He could not let the enemy escape, and gather more power to return!

Solera burst out of the waters even as the bottom of the hand, now the top, a little bit above the surface of the verdant waters, opened up. A shining gray hand emerged, followed by the body of an exotic woman, her otherworldly face contorted into a vicious snarl.

The moment she bent down into a jumping position, Solera’s spear pierced right into her heart. His body followed an instant later, careening into the woman. The woman uttered a shrill scream, her hand rising up to grab his face.

He was not Solera, he realized as her hand came into contact with him. He-- she-- was nobody at all.

She was born at the dawn of time, she remembered. But what she could never remember, was her name. The other children pelted her with rocks, called her “jumpy” when she screamed. They were led by That Boy, she remembered. She hated them all, but she hated That Boy the most. Because all she ever wanted was to be left alone, and it was That Boy who would get them all to bother her. It was because of That Boy that she forgot her name, and became Jumpy. But she never wanted to be Jumpy. She’d rather have been nobody at all.

They would never leave her alone, even after they discovered the lands outside Home and That Boy became That Man, the king of Real. Because That Man told her to forget the past, that she would be trapped with him forever, and because she had the Voidwalking bloodline, the one which would allow them to travel to the Void and back. She would never, never ever ever give them what they wanted!

That Man told her to forget the past, that she would be trapped with him forever. They gave chase, so she fled to the Void, the one place they could not follow her. The one place she could be left alone. But she could never be left alone, not in the Void.

Solera paled as a trillion images of the Void shot through his mind. Hellscapes made from twisted corpses, desperate struggles in lands beyond his comprehension. An eyeball rose from twisting black rivers, in a valley of shattered glass. The flames of a gargantuan, three-eyed bird, burning her back as she fled. It was not for an eternity until the freaks, the monsters began running from her, for she had become stronger, more fearsome than all of them combined.

She was no monster. But everyone else was, from the children of her childhood to the spirits of the Void. The only person she could rely upon was herself. Everyone else was a monster! She had to kill them all, until only she was left! Kill, crush, devour, exterminate, destroy, slay, oblit-

He twisted the spear, eliciting another scream from the woman. While she had been distracting him with her mental assault, needles had risen from the surface of the claw-hand, preparing to stab into him. They shivered, then fell away as Solera ripped the spear out and plunged it back in. He stabbed her again and again, his face white with terror.

Because this woman, despite her beautiful face and alluring body, was a monster beyond monsters! A woman whose insanity knew no bounds, a woman who was no longer a woman, but an abomination which had been deranged for millions of years! He remembered the most maddening vision of them all, the vision of herse- no, of what the woman had become, and shuddered. The tiny versions of herself, bizarre and fearsome as they were, could not hold a candle when compared to her true form in Sky. Even the woman he was killing right now was nothing, he knew as he stabbed her another time. She was only a miniscule clone of a spirit of unfathomable size, one perhaps larger than all of Land!

The woman, and the hand of the claw itself had long dissolved into goop, melting into Solera’s Lake, but he continued to stab downwards into the green waters. This monstrosity within him had to be completely purged from his mind, or else it would drive him insane!

For a long time, he stabbed every gray speck he saw, gasping as he tried to get rid of the visions from his memory. But there was one, terrible, terrible realization on his mind, one of the trillions of crazy thoughts the spirit had whispered to him, an offhand whisper, totally unimportant to the monster herself, one whose magnitude he desperately needed to wrap his mind around, but could not.

In the vast territory of that superpower which called itself the Pantheon, in the central continent and in the colony on the eastern side of his western continent, every single person, every single man, woman, and child, every single merchant, slave, soldier, and king, every single one of them, without exception, had been possessed by this demon!

The image of the green waters and vines, of the mud and the milky gray liquid, began to fade away. The real world came back into focus, the circular rift, still spewing out that sinister gray fog, reoccupying the center of Solera’s vision. He stared at it, his face covered with sweat.

“It looked like a hard fight.” A man’s rich voice sounded out, friendly and cheerful. “He must have been a summoner. But no matter. Welcome to our new Home, myself. A place where we can be alone… together.”