The Patriarch of the Tornado Sect appeared next to Solera, a warm and soothing smile on his face. It was as if he was looking at a child or a lover, rather than an unkempt boy he had just tossed onto an altar to be sacrificed.

It sent chills down Solera’s spine.

Right now, he was dealing with a monster which had possessed an entire continent! Solera could not wrap his head around the sheer amount of people that meant. It had to be billions. Billions of minds, extinguished by this… this thing. The Gray, he decided to call it.

The Gray occupying this light-skinned, long-haired man’s body smiled again.

“Love?”

Solera struggled to calm himself down. Could he convince this insane monster in front of him that he really had been possessed by… by a clone of itself? Or was he too sane to fake the insanity?

The threat of possession quite literally loomed above him, spewing out its disgusting gray fog. If he could not convince this man, then another Gray would descend, and there would be no verdant power to save him another time.

He wasn’t good at lying, but he had to sell this illusion.

“Yes.” Solera tried to sound upbeat to match the Gray’s repulsive expression, but he couldn’t do it, not when he was experiencing this abject terror.

The Gray didn’t seem to notice, his hand reaching out to muss Solera’s hair. “I know the fight was hard, love, but you must remember the boy’s memories. He is a special one, he might have important information for us.”

Not the Gray. If he continued to call this man the Gray, then his fear would never leave. This man in front of him was just a man, nothing more.

“What was the boy’s name, and where did he come from?” The man whispered into Solera’s ear, nibbling it lightly.

What the fuck?

“Solera from Eden.” He blurted out before he could panic again. Focus!

“Which part of Eden?”

“The Grove.” No lying. Not if he didn’t have to.

“As we expected. Who was his father?”

“V-Vinoh.” He stammered as his thoughts went into disarray. What was the Gr-- the man talking about?

The man backed away with such speed that Solera almost thought he teleported. Solera groaned inwardly and closed his eyes to wait for the inevitable. What had given him away? Or did, for some reason, they hate his father that much?

“The father… he is alive?”

“Yes.” Solera immediately answered in relief, then stiffened. If the Gray, for whatever reason, hated Vinoh, then saying yes meant unleashing the wrath of an entire superpower, and more, on his father, a crippled man!

Had he just condemned his father to death?

Solera’s mind was thrown into chaos once more. He was not good at lying, but he had to do what he had to do! If he lied and the monster saw through him, then his lie would have been for naught and he would have been discovered, on top of it all. He did the right thing, he really did!

But what if the Gray really did want to kill his father? What if Vinoh died because of what he had just said, right here, right now?

Solera trembled. No matter what, he had failed his father here. Again.

He had always failed Vinoh. He had failed to cure his father with the power crystal, because he had been taken all the way to the Tornado Sect. He had failed to protect himself for the same reason. And his dream of making his father proud by becoming an immortal in his stead was just that, a dream.

He had given nothing back to Vinoh, he realized. And now, he was giving Vinoh away.

He realized the man had been quiet for some time. Thinking, with worry. Their eyes met, and Solera froze. The Patriarch smiled gently.

“Don’t worry, love. All will be well. We will just have to locate the hidden immortal, find out what he has been doing for the past decade. No large matter. It will be as if they summoned another Seraph.” He spoke more to himself than to Solera.

Solera opened his mouth, about to say that Vinoh was crippled, an old man who had stayed in the Grove doing nothing but training him, but he hesitated.

This man was the Patriarch, the most important decision maker of the entire Tornado Sect! No doubt he also had a hand in their plans to invade Eden! If he said nothing here, then the Patriarch would see a threat when there was none. Could he then become more fearful, and tell his generals to be more careful? That would give some respite for the soldiers of Eden, some time to regroup and summon more monsters to their side!

But if he did say it, then the Patriarch would not send anyone to hunt Vinoh down. His father would be safe, for the time being! And who was to say that a more careful enemy would better than a reckless one? King Reginald had been the leader of a mercenary army, once, if Solera remembered correctly. A master thinker and strategist. Maybe what he needed to face was a reckless enemy he could outplay; if so, Solera would be making everything go wrong with his attempt to help.

“Yes, love?” The Patriarch softly prodded Solera.

Solera shook his head several times before speaking. “It’s nothing.”

“No, say it. Your words are valuable, love. You don’t ever have to put yourself down again.”

Solera looked blankly at the wall behind the Patriarch. Well, there was too many ways this half-assed idea could’ve gone wrong. Better to just stick with the original plan and keep telling the truth. “The… the father is crippled. He has done nothing, and is soon to die.”

The Patriarch tilted his head, his long gray hair drifting slightly. “That is not nothing.”

Solera felt his stomach clench. He frantically grabbed at the first excuses which came to mind. “It was difficult to remember!” A lie, which he immediately followed with a truth. “The boy had strong feelings towards it.”.

The Patriarch shook his head forlornly. His hands grabbed Solera’s bindings and unlatched it from its hook. “Poor child. Your mind is still weak from the battle. Do not let the vestigial feelings of a slimy, two-faced future backstabber sway you. The only ones you can trust are your selves. Us. Everyone else is a monster, snake-tongued and savage. You killed the filthy boy, love. You will kill, kill until our home is clean of bugs and pests. Okay?”

Solera dumbly nodded. Insane. So insane.

The Patriarch undid the last strap, patting Solera’s head again. “Good, very good. We won’t have to bother with the man, then. He is too stupid to be of any threat, and his body is crippled. Last question, and you can go have a nice sleep. Did the boy know anything about his porous channels, his high cultivation, the second Lake in his back?”

Solera vaguely remembered something, but he felt he could shake his head quite confidently, so he did. But he would make sure to look at his channels again later, using his new clarity or whatever it was.

The Patriarch quirked his lips, but it didn’t look as if he had expected anything. He shot a beam of light into the wall, causing the ceiling itself to slide open and reveal the gray sky above. Wings erupted from his back, and he took Solera into his arms.

“You are lucky, love.” He said as they rose into the air. “You occupy the body of a boy with a cultivation class of nearly 100, something only the most privileged elite and talented can achieve at… eighteen years of age?”

“Thirteen.” Solera muttered. No, he was fourteen now.

“Thirteen!” The Patriarch’s eyebrows rose. “The boy must have been very special to the enemy then. You are very, very lucky.”

A twinge of fury rose in Solera’s heart, but he quelled it immediately. Him, special and lucky? Those were the two words which would least describe him! But he could not be angry here, not at this monster, especially not when he was already hundreds of meters high into the air.

They flew towards the whirling vortex. Upon taking a second look, Solera could take in its sheer awesomeness. The base of it was at least a kilometer in diameter, covering the very tip of the mountain, as if the mountain was its anchor, and he could not estimate its height, but it rose up until it merged with the highest cloud layer. No, it didn’t merge with the highest cloud layer. It created it. Clouds emerged from the center of the funnel, spinning around it at unimaginable speeds until they escaped from the vortex and sunk below the mountains.

The Tornado Sect’s capital, he remembered Lem telling him, was the highest point in the entire continent, at the top of a plateau, which was atop a vast mountain range, which in turn was atop the Thunderslab. This vortex, then, had to be the root of the endless clouds which blanketed the country. No, but Rasmurnov had said the clouds came from the ocean, or something. Whatever, he had stopped being angry about whatever he was angry about.

“I still remember the Void. Bad things trying to eat us, voices saying bad things, mean things, selfish things. Trillions of voices, and they never go away no matter how many we kill.” The Patriarch’s voice was quivering, and his vocabulary had been reduced back to that of a child’s. “But you’ll be alone now, love. Alone to get some rest, for a little while.”

Solera said nothing, because he had no idea what to say. The man was being insane again. He tensed as they flew right into the vortex, but he felt nothing at all. He opened his eyes to see that the Patriarch had conjured a tornado around his body to fend off the winds of this tremendous vortex.

The faint, hazy outline of the mountain appeared, but it was obscured by the whirling brown dust of the vortex and the tornado. As they drew closer, the outline gained in detail, revealing a palace built into the very mountain itself, a vast, hulking amalgamation of rock, metal, and even wood. Yet its tip, just like the mountain it rested on, was obscured by yet another vortex, a smaller one which shot without limit up into the sky.

And then the winds disappeared behind them. They were in the eye of the storm, an eye which situated itself at the center of this majestic mountain-palace. The Patriarch touched ground, his landing no more than a leisurely walk. The man was an insane monster, but it seemed he could not be underestimated. Though such a thing should be obvious, seeing as he was the Patriarch.

The Patriarch let go of Solera with one hand, using it to open a door which swung quietly on its hinges. He laid Solera onto the bed and stood up, a smile on his face.

“Get some rest, child. Your vessel needs cleaning, but I know you want some time to rest. Enjoy our new home, for now. Tomorrow, we will start teaching you about this world. There is much work to be done ahead of us. Rest well.”

The Patriarch kissed Solera’s head before leaving. When the door quietly closed, Solera immediately rose to look at the room. It was bare, with only the bed, a table, a chargelight, and the two rivulets which would be his drinking water and toilet. These two rivulets were clearly the norm for the Tornado Sect, he realized. But the important thing was that nobody else was in the room.

He released a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. It was an incredibly deep breath, one carrying more weight than he could imagine.

He was safe. For the first time in so, so long, his life was not in imminent danger. During the entire interrogation, the Patriarch had not been the least bit suspicious of him. Almost as if he was incapable of thinking about the possibility that Solera could have won against the possession, or that he could have lied.

Of course, he was not out of the woods yet. He was in the center of the Tornado Sect, thousands of kilometers from home, trapped with a monster which thought Solera was its kindred. But there was nobody threatening to kill people he knew. Nobody chopping off his hand, feeding him pills, whipping his back, digging tunnels for an ambush.

No, it wasn’t perfect. But like he had thought about during the interrogation, it was a temporary respite. A time for him to catch his breath, and recover from the countless sufferings he had endured. In that way, he and the Gray he was supposed to be were not so different: two creatures in need of a rest.

He collapsed onto the bed.