“Rise and shine princess,” whispered a voice in Ashton’s head.

Groggily and dazed, Ashton opened his eyes, only to be met with more darkness.

“Hey! Come on, there’s some stuff I wanna show you before we starve to death or something,” urged Ash.

The newborn baby slowly gathered his bearings, lifting his battered head off the metal bars of his cage, still half asleep and badly bruised.

Ashton’s severe pain, empty stomach and the freezing cold temperature of the basement did not make for a great night’s sleep at all.

As he lay naked, face down in the bottom of his cage, Ashton tried to roll over, but simply lacked the energy to do it.

In fact, he lacked the energy for anything and was still barely conscious.

Suddenly a surge of energy crashed through his body, washing away the pain and exhaustion, his entire body glowed with energy and Ashton felt incredible, like he could do anything anywhere.

Yet the feeling was temporary, and the energy slowly faded away, leaving Ashton stunned and also no longer bruised, starved or cold, a great improvement from earlier.

“Got your attention now?” beamed Ash.

“W-W-What was that?” questioned Ashton.

“Well, you know how that other dude from before used magic to light the torches, I tried to do so some while you were asleep. Seeing as you got control of the body I thought, hey, maybe I can do magic then, that would be pretty cool, and to my amazement I can!” boasted Ash.

“W-wait a second… if you could do that this entire time… w-why didn’t you just do it earlier and I would’ve been able to sleep peacefully, you know, not in agonizing pain!?” whined Ashton.

“As I was saying earlier,” ignored Ash. “I practised while you slept. I don’t know about you, but I can feel this weird energy in everything, it’s like everything, and I mean everything, this room included. But everything has its like, own weird set of vein type things that carry mana and I can sense those.”

“Don’t dodge my question! Why didn’t you heal me earlier!?” Ashton cried out in annoyance.

“As I was saying… I can sense these weird magic vein things in everything, also inside of us. So while you slept, I tried willing the energy around us, however unfortunately no matter what, it refused to move. So mucked around for a bit and instead, I tried to drag in energy from our surroundings and then pushed it back out and it bled out of our veins leaking into the air, then I could actually move it around. I also discovered that even the air has its own energy, it just doesn’t have its own vein system, instead it just floats there, it’s like the energy from the veins bled out and isn’t contained in anything, I don’t know about you but I found that to be pretty interesting,” continued Ash, intentionally ignoring Ashton.

“Hey!” shrieked Ashton who was trying to get his attention and failing miserably.

“So on closer inspection, it seems that these veins are actually like skin in away… wait… was it skin that breathed in air? I’m not sure… regardless, the ‘magic veins’ can ‘inhale’ the natural energy and at the same time, I can ‘exhale’ them back out and I can will it to do stuff like explode or something,”

Ashton sighed, realising Ash was never going to answer him and instead asked another question,

“Wait… then how did you do magic inside of my body, if that’s where the ‘magic veins’ are?”

“Well… I sent the energy from your ‘magical veins’ to your actual veins and willed it to give you actual energy and heal you,” explained Ash.

“Hang on… d-didn’t you say this stuff can explode? Why did you do it INSIDE my body?! What if it went wrong and I exploded!” yelled Ashton.

“Relax Ashton, I totally… definitely, most probably kinda knew what I was doing,” assured Ash.

“A-Anyway… check this out, it’s pretty cool!” Ash hastily exclaimed.

Before Ashton could respond he saw a strange little ball of glowing light in the corner of his eye.

Curious, he tried to turn and have a look to be met with hundreds of the strange orbs of light.

All of them slowly floated over to him and then entered his body and his blood red markings glowed brightly in acceptance.

They gathered inside of his body, energy coursed through his veins, his muscles, his bones and organs, building up more and more pressure before exploding outwards and sending a ravenous wall of white fire into the side of the building.

His cage had been instantly consumed by the flames, leaving behind a smouldering, melted mess and a suspiciously unharmed demon baby.

The wall however suffered much heavier damages.

An enormous red, glowing hole was carved into it and liquid glass ran off the edges like a waterfall, pooling together on the ground beneath it, creating a small crystalline pond of glass.

Grains of white hot sand were sent flying through the air from the impact and they melted small holes into the ground.

“Whoops” joked Ash.

Ashton looked down at himself in amazement, noticing a strange blue lustre covering his body and it shimmered as a few orange lights danced down the stairway towards him.

Looking up, Ashton saw the old demon man staring angrily at him as a small orange flame danced on the top of his palm.

“Wow… you know… I really did not expect that… like, not at all,” admitted Ash.

“W-What are we going to do?! He looks like he wants to kill us!” yelped Ashton.

“Rubbish, I’m sure we’ll be fi-” started Ash before a huge wave of blue energy slammed into their side, crushing Ashton half to death and sending him back to sleep.

********

Ashton awoke in distress, he tried to squirm around but found himself strapped down by several heavy chains.

His body was covered with nasty purple bruises and he had bloodshot eyes.

With blurry vision he could barely make out the outline of another cage that seemed much larger than the other one but waves of exhaustion slammed into him, threatening him to send him back to sleep, perhaps forever.

In the distance he thought he could hear Ash yelling on about something, yet he couldn’t manage to process anything properly.

Colours blurred into each other and sounds melded together, leaving only an annoying buzzing sound ringing in his left ear.

He felt as if he were being carried somewhere, yet he was unsure, he was unsure of anything.

A hot searing pain burned its way into Ashton’s side, sending him into a fit of screaming, red crept across his vision and his back arched up in pain.

The buzzing in his left ear grew louder and louder, the pain grew more and more unbearable and now all he could see was red, his eyes burning in their sockets.

Unable to handle it for any longer Ashton blacked out, temporarily easing the agony.

********

“Hey… Ashton! It’s all okay now get up… well… maybe not ‘okay’, but… yeah, I guess it’s not that great at all really, but hey getting up might be nice,” whispered Ash to Ashton.

Hearing Ash’s whispering, Ashton awoke and found himself no longer in pain, rather back to normal, not a single bruise or wound of any kind.

Instead he found himself lying on a small raft with a large transparent crystal embedded in the centre.

The raft was small, roughly four by four metres and was made out of the dark wood that the boat and desk was from the town.

A small sun, about half the size of Earth’s, shone down on him, providing a tiny amount of warmth.

Black fog drifted over the raft, impeding his view and sending ice cold chills down his spine.

Ashton crawled over to the edge and gasped, they were floating above a huge black abyss with no bottom, was he back in the void?

Looking up and across from him, he saw the desert they had come from, now kilometres away.

The village was sitting next to the edge of several massive cliffs that dropped away sharply into the seemingly infinite abyss.

The raft he laid on was hovering over the open abyss, slowly drifting further and further from the desert and deeper and deeper into the abyss.

“W… What…. Happened?” mumbled Ashton.