If Mirio had the luxury of time he may have chuckled at the absurdity of his situation.

He had given it his all, accomplished the greatest of tasks he could have ever conceived, and yet instead of finding solace and a slice of what others might expect to be owed, he yet again found everything taken away.

Was it the nature of things to rise to the top, only to become trapped in its circling currents never to be let go?

If so, what was the point of it, beyond one’s own determinations?

What was it about accomplishments that always sowed a seed of struggle?

He loosened his fingertips, allowing them to feel the absence of Ember for a moment longer as bared tooth and claw lunged toward him.

What did it matter to hurry in this darkness?

For in darkness the only winner is he who takes the risk where others do not dare…

No longer able to rely upon the strength of Ember, he spun back his arm and called forth the dark magic of his curse.

Mirio’s eyes widened as the blade resisted his call.

“Shit!”

His eyes locked onto the beast as its talons sliced through the dark.

With a hissing stream of blue light, Mirio vanished and streamed up onto the beast’s shoulders, gripping tight to its matted fur as his form materialized.

The corner of his lips pulled tight as the curse’s influence struggled viciously against his command.

FWOOSH

The swiping grip of the beast tore toward him, pulling himself tighter to the beast and gritting his teeth he narrowly dodged the blow.

Whirling magic circles spun in his blood as he focused his might into overpowering the mark.

WHOOSH

With a whip of black magic the dagger wound its way into his grip. Wisps of dark energy seething from his veins and pooling within his grip.

SLASH

THUNK

The beast smashed to the stone, the back of its neck oozing with blood and its serpent-like tongue unfurling along the ground, as Mirio leapt down.

“Damn it… I had to use my last spell”

“Oh well”

Ever since the battle at the hilltop, and recovering from his injuries, his ability to fight came to him like old memories that jumped out at him when in need. It was as if his body did not know any other way to move. It was as though his powers came from a place unknown, though he in part remembered forging them himself. It was a strange mix of self belief and unconquerable certainty, that wound its way through his body like veins of steel in stone.

He could not help but step away from the beast’s fallen corpse with contempt, his remaining eye filled with a cold disdain.

This was not his realm.

He was the monster here.

Not a monster of muscle and sharpened fangs, but a monster capable of meeting out anguish and despair to those who could not match his expertise in battle. He stood like a wall of terror more threatening than bared fangs.

He hated how much he relished the feeling, and was not so much sneering in contempt of the slain, but in all he was forced to be.

He lifted his chin and wiped away a bead of sweat. If he could, he would keep to the shadows, and use cunning to make his way, to spare intruding on this domain.

The tick tick tick of dripping saliva hit the cavern floor back over his shoulder. The faint glow of the horizon no longer shined on his silhouette.

Red eyes of every manner of beast beared down upon him with all of their menace, a wall of terror to match his own.

“Friends of yours?”

He sighed, how was he to fight them now that his mana was spent. He could not mist step past them, nor fend them off with a wall of flame. He also could not drive them back with divine light, at least not beyond meager flashes. So what then, how was he meant to overcome this sea of beasts before him?

His eyes dipped as he searched for the strength to find the way.

“I fight hardest when at my weakest” he muttered, slipping his back foot into a fighting position.

“I will not be defeated by veils of truth”

“I will remember all that I am”

“I won’t let this be taken from me!”

“I believe in more!”

His eyes flickered across the terrain, sizing up the battlefield, taking note of a rocky outcrop off to the right, a valley down the way littered with potholes.

His eyes flicked quickly to the source of light in the distance, and then back towards a hulking behemoth before him.

THUD THUD. THUD THUD

The beast stared down at him before raising its club and slamming it down with force enough to splinter and crack the stone upon which Mirio had been standing.

The brittle volcanic rock splintered into shards of slate, one of which sliced across Mirio’s knuckles leaving blood to drip onto the dagger and be drawn into its dark magic.

Mirio could feel the pressure of monsters just beyond the goliath creature, their eyes bearing down on him. He hadn’t the luxury of taking on the creature, no, he had to run!

He spun on his feet and dashed towards the rock outcrops. Spinning and stepping through as though it was a dance. The behemoth towered behind him, smashing aside the boulders with several hard cracks of its club.

SMASH

The rock splintered, but so too did the creature’s club, leaving it to roar in frustration as all manner of other beasts rushed past it.

Mirio shot down into the valley, its walls towering above him on either side as creatures of all kinds ran above and behind.

Mirio heaved with each breath as the storm of claws rage grew. Without a moment to rest or think of a plan, his way ahead was cut by the piercing red gaze of a horned beast that stood up on its hind legs.

With a quick sneer of disdain, Mirio’s eye narrowed, and silver strands wound their way around the beast as Mirio’s form split into a shifting field of ghost forms. Each action carefully considered to a depth that would take any other months to decipher, each ghost form fought against the pressure of the beast but dissipated like rain against a wall of stone.

Each swipe of its arm, parried by a slice of his dagger, and a twist of his body, only to be met with the crushing swipe of a second pair of scythed arms.

His pace quickened as the beast’s size grew alongside its bloodlust.

He could not slow down, the only answer was to move even faster, and in between the split second of his arrival and the thousands of thoughts that spun like the wild whip of river rapids, use the pressure to amplify his ability to find a way through.

With no suitable choice appearing, he had no choice but to collide into the mammoth wall of muscle and its desire to dominate.

“If I can’t make it around… The only choice is through!”

With a flick he slipped the tip of his dagger between the joint bones of its hand and sliced through flesh and sinew to tear through its grasp. Passing through with a splash of blood, he soared past the beast and found his footing.

Not pausing for a moment, he gazed up at the creatures pulling ahead of him atop the cliffs of the valley above.

WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP

The thud of creatures sounded behind him as creatures leaped from above.

He was still just ahead, if only by the thinnest of margins.

The stone was uneven and full of potholes eager to snatch up his footing, forcing him to focus on each step as the slope began to climb.

Shooting uphill his legs burned as his lungs gasped desperately for every last bit of air they could get.

The stampede of monsters collided into him from both sides as he launched out of the valley. In the mass of limbs and gnashing jaws, he slashed and swept his way through the clatter. A wall of blood spat out the far side, and he appeared ahead of the pack like an arrow.

As the tidal wave of beasts rumbled behind him, only the faint red glimmer on the horizon held any hope.

…

Readjusting his grip on his pipe the storyteller caressed Rose’s little red locks.

“Ay my sweet girl, this world wasn’t always a place of magic and monsters. Once upon a time it was just meadows as far as the eye could see. A veritable paradise where folk like us lived free.

Yet with the coming of powerful beings to the world, there was naught to do for our ancestors but what they could to protect what little of it we could.

And in our fight for our home, we learned a lesson we shan’t forget”

“Both great good, and great evil, are found in the things we decide upon when all else seems lost”

“Good folk are not those who act strongest in times of obvious peril, they are those who decide to make the difference when all others would look aside”

Rose stared up at her whimsical pa’s beard and pipe as he came to his point, she was struck in awe by the weight of his words and felt privileged that he was willing to entrust them to her.

“Be careful of that which you seek in times of peril, for if you only seek the comfort of obvious truths, the price you pay might just be everything you hold dear”

It was an ominous warning, a threat that existed beyond the horizon of all she knew, something that meant she could lose everything if her actions under stress were misguided.

She scrunched her face up, and pouted her lips.

Weren’t all of her choices misguided?

“No fair pa! No one can choose right every time!”

“Hah!” he blurted out in a hearty chuckle that didn’t abate until he choked on his pipe.

“On that you might well be right”

…

1 YEAR LATER

The abyss is no place for man.

It is a world that never sleeps.

A place where feral clans of monsters fight all others for supremacy, for there is nothing else in this place but the stone.

Yet in the stone if you look, there are places of refuge.

Sure, you cannot stay in them long, unless some wandering creature catches your scent and seeks to pry you out like an oyster from a shell.

But… There, I found moments of rest, to maintain my sanity.

Mirio’s hand shimmered with blue as he opened his eyes amid the dark shadows of stone.

He could hear the creatures lurking close by, distracted by the fresh bodies he left scattered by the perimeter as offering to this place’s ceaseless hunger.

“Almost” he whispered to himself as his hand returned from whatever immaterial plane it had gone to.

Reaching down at his feet he lifted up a glob of meat and gnawed down on it with practiced indifference. He wiped his beard with his forearm and dislodged bits of flesh and grime. Monster meat was tough as leather, but fortunately edible.

The red horizon seemed to forever elude him, drifting just beyond reach of a day's travel, and then further distancing itself as he stopped to rest. It was a constant battle against doubt as he pushed himself to the limit of his humanity to reach it.

Was it even possible for a human being to reach it?

He didn’t know, all he knew was that every step he had taken, was the best he could have done. And if anyone still stood a chance, he did, and he wasn’t about to let it slip away.

Creeping from the total black of his shelter for the night, he rushed with the lightest of steps past the feasting monsters.

There were certain strategies that worked best in this place, stealth was the most preferred of options, but when that wasn’t possible, it was key to know the kind of beast you were facing and their stake on the territory. If you could find their rival and draw them to each other, they would combat each other before anything else.

Frenzies were common, like the first day he had arrived in this place, but they were a matter of endurance to outlast. Beasts were not the greatest at measuring their own needs, and balancing their expenditure of energy.

And when it came to trapper beasts, the sort that lived in the darkness, and set up vile traps of acid and collapsing tunnels… Well, they were best avoided, by sensing the slight tremor they gave to the stone under your feet. Hence, shoes were a liability he couldn’t afford, even if most of the ground in this place was sharp enough to draw blood.

Weaving his way through valleys and rocky corridors, and past beasts busied by murderous intent, he took a steady stride in pursuit of the light. So long had he looked through the spell of his eagle eye, and through the world winds, that the red light no longer looked to him like crimson, but like any other light, bright and full of possibility.

It was a mad choice to see something so dreary as something so desired, yet, it kept him going and he knew that was the first step to getting past the horizon to somewhere else.

He minded the time by weaving together little stories in his mind, ideas of people who had faced everything he had seen before, and had faced it in their own way, using their own strength to find their place in it. They were nice enough stories, but in this place, nothing so sweet could survive, except in his dreams.

As the day dragged on his steady panting rhythm was interrupted by the air becoming unusually dry. Mirio tried to wet his lips, only for them to quickly lose all moisture a moment later. Several hours later the stone under his feet became warm, and hours after that the red light that had always hidden itself just beyond the horizon rose like the dawn.

At last, he had arrived.

…

The heated stone cracked and hissed under foot, almost as though alive. Mirio for the first time in as long as he could remember, no longer needed to run. In fact, the nature of the fragile stone under his feet demanded that he walk.

Where others might have found it discomforting to stand above such volatility, he found it soothing. Like the gentle thrum of a fireplace, or the way Ember had once sung within his hands. It was far preferable to the cold indifference he had grown accustomed to, however, he remained on guard as he traversed his way to the gate.

Black ichor oozed from the step stones leading to the gate, forming into streams, and collecting in bubbling pools that surrounded the heated stone like swamplands. Taking care not to step in the wretched substance Mirio headed up the stepstones until he reached their precipice.

Upon the platform at great distance he could make out a human shadow standing before the gate. As he approached closer, he made out the movement of her black hair against the cold breeze flowing from the ruby red gate.

Mirio stopped his approach and gazed out at the plains of the abyss that circled below. The monsters kept their distance from this place. Why?

Could it be that a monster had laid its claim to the territory.

Bah! He was too exhausted to care, he’d deal with it if he had to, even if dealing with it meant facing a valiant death.

Like the splitting rays of sunset casting around a mountain the figure loomed, waiting for him.

Her pallid beauty carved itself amid skin as smooth as porcelain, her hair as black as the night draping down to her waist. Her gaze locked onto Mirio with the intensity of a Dragon. Focus driving into him with the molten intensity of a volcano.

As she walked towards him, he couldn’t help but recoil by instinct.

“You will be the tool that turns the tide! And at last, you are mine!”

Her voice carried like a shout, though it was uttered as a whisper. The power of her being beyond comprehension, even to Mirio who had seen all manner of being in this place.

“Yours?!” Mirio said as he pulled his reaction under control, “Oh no, I’m most decidedly not”

Mirio stepped closer and met the woman’s gaze with his own, allowing the silver threads of the world winds to flutter around her form and investigate the power emanating from her.

“Whoever the hell you think you are,” he continued, “I don’t care, I’m going through that gate up there. I’m going home!”

A smile crept its way up the woman’s cheeks and pulled into a toothy grin.

“I know the place,” she said with narrowed eyes, “and no, you aren’t leaving”

“So it is a fight then?” he chuckled “Fair warning though, I wouldn’t advise it, I didn’t make it here because I’m a pushover”

“Hahaha” she screeched out in a cackle, “And who do you think designed such a place?”

“Designed?”

“That was only but to test your resolve”

“A test? Of resolve?”

“Either you would prove too weak to serve me, and would die, or you live up to your potential to become a weapon of the darkness and find your way to me”

If Mirio was taken aback by this reveal, he did not give her time to see it.

“Quite a god complex you have going on there, no offense. You are welcome to it but I’m heading to the gate now. Stop me if you can, I guess…”

Mirio pushed past the strange woman and their eyes clashed between heartbeats.

BADUMP

The air held tension as thick as any battle as the beauty refused to let Mirio escape her gaze.

She peeled her lips seductively back across her sharp canines.

“MY POWER IS BEYOND THE GODS!!!”

Mirio stopped, taking a moment to eye the woman’s shadow as cast by the light of the gate behind him. Before him stood a four legged beast, winged, and with a serpent’s head. Before him was the great Dragon Ladon, the one that had stood at his back in Akur’s dark castle, and the one that had cast him into the Abyss with Valian’s aid.

Of course it was Ladon…

How hard had the year been for him to have forgotten that the creature might lie in wait here. Though he didn’t expect it to be a woman.

“So Ladon, tell me something, how is it you are in so many places? I get you are more powerful than the gods and all that, but I’m just curious”

“Hmph” she said as lowering her gaze and reflecting internally for a moment. Her demeanor softened for a moment if only to recall the truth of her situation, to relate it honestly to Mirio. If she was to consume his life, purpose, and soul, she at least owed him as much.

“My body still lies chained beneath the misty meadows. My shadow travels as I wish it. And the form you see before you, is the part of me that is truly chained. What is left of the woman I once was”

“You were human?”

“Long ago… My humanity stays with me here, my defiance lingers within my dragon flesh, and my rage travels as the shadows of my mind, unlimited in their reach”

The white in Mirio’s eyes froze for a moment as he comprehended just how vast her power must be to exist in three such forms all at once.

“And yet he has you, right where he wants you, clawing to compete for ultimate dominance over the world and its fate”, he said as he stared deep into her fiery eyes, “Haven’t you realized it yet… You are his greatest ally! A weapon with a will! A force he only has to direct to a purpose!”

Ladon stared back at him unmoved, yet focused on every detail of his words. She didn’t attempt to win this battle of words with malice alone, nor did she feel she had to. Without pretense nor an instinct to interrupt she allowed Mirio to continue.

“Just as you say you own me, he owns you! And by extension I can only assume this is part of a plan to also remove me as whatever, barely relevant irritation I am to him”

Mirio wasn’t one for talking, but now that he had started to speak his mind, it was as though a dam had broken. Who else after all could understand his thoughts better than this tortured creature, the being that rivaled the depths of the void that Akur alone could control.

“Why are you doing all this? How did he wound you this deeply,” Mirio said with the note of his words ending in tenderness.

“Why would you give everything, all you are, in every waking moment, to this man. Granting your chastity to him, and becoming a slave to this insane quest of yours!”

The power of Mirio’s insight drove through the armored layers of Ladon’s immortal heart and made her resolve waiver. It was as though shards of her heart split off against her will as he chiseled away at a truth too horrible for her to bear.

Ladon clutched her chest and heaved for breath.

Tears welled in her eyes, and flowed down her cheeks as she lifted her chin and stared back at him with honest clarity. The only remaining evidence of her being shaken was the redness to her cheeks and the glistening light caught in her tears.

“You have not lived even a span of two decades, and you speak as though it compares to a being who counts its lifetime in the span of millenia!” “You are a trivial creature! Nothing more than a pawn in a greater game!” “A game I will win!” “Rejoice!”

She chuckled under her breath, disguising the hideous twist of her smile behind shadow.

Mirio gazed upon her with concern, but dared not sympathize. She was without a doubt, a monster in more than appearances. Her mind was sharp, and laced with a venum that had no antidote. She was a victim of tragic circumstances to be sure, but at the same time, a ship without anchor amidst a storm. A force that could only ever crash into those who seek to come to its aid.

This beast wished to wield him… To use him as a weapon against Akur.

And as wounded as its motives were, as justified as her claims might be, she had turned away from truth long before he had arrived, and he was certain he was not a substitute for it. As a weapon, even if he considered it, he would be nothing more than grains of sand lost to the winds of time. Akur could merely outlast him, outwit him, and out prepare him to blunt his impact.

It was lunacy. A madness he had seen in mankind when reading through history books, and being told about it during classes held monthly in Elmvale when he was growing up. Or at least the few classes he had ever attended anyway.

While his situation was for all intents and purposes, terrifying, he was a captive of curiosity too.

This conversation after all was with an almost omnipotent elder being after all. He felt some sense of relief, because he finally understood where he stood in the battle between Akur and Ladon.

When he had walked the halls of Akur’s dark castle, and been greeted by his deathly visage, it would have been easy to have cast him as the villain, and the dragon at his back, a force for good. However, had he believed that without question, because of some desire to be the hero, he could have ended up like the being before him. Broken by the truths she dare not face, by the voids Akur used to control her.

Ladon was almost certainly a hero at one time, but what she had become was a desperate shell of it, chasing after an illusion that no longer mattered.

Dasha also had this hero complex, intertwined with her desire to be a knight. There were also the stories of that Yuta fellow that he had heard from Silvia who also fit the bill, almost killing her because of his self obsession and inability to control his own mind.

This curse was all too common, especially if he could point it out almost anywhere he looked.

Just as Akur’s voids blinded the world, Ladon’s undying fury left it desperate to latch onto anything it could.

Was the desire to do great things always such a double edged sword?

And if so, how could he get beyond the voids of Akur, without desperately taking up arms?

Mirio’s thoughts rushed through him at an otherworldly speed, flowing through the world winds, and forming magical glyphs as it moved. Unknown to him, he had begun to sing a song, of a magic long forgotten to the world, as a melody emerged from the subtlety of his mind.

As he gazed back up at Ladon, he knew in truth that she could not hold him here, and that if he was to walk through that gate, he would soon be on a path back home.

Ladon looked at him with a slight turn to her face, twisting in an attempt to pry out his thoughts, and sensing the warbling nature of bardic song in his soul.

Mirio’s thoughts continued… If this is all true, then why doesn’t anybody speak of it? Should it not be shared like common sense? Insisted upon without end?

Or had it been, and he hadn’t ever listened?

Were heroes cast into the storm, without direction, purpose, or a way to define who they were or what they might become, simply because they ignored this truth?

“Shit” Mirio said as he choked on a potent realization.

“I’m sorry… I misspoke” he uttered out under a knitted brow, “You aren’t the tool of Akur…”

“Quiet! If I wanted your opinion I would ask for it”

Mirio felt the menace of her gaze, but pulled his hand into a fist, and stared at her defiantly. His eyes shot into her like daggers made out of the most ruthless of truths.

“You are just betrayed and… Alone”

Ladon recoiled in disgust and sharpened her talons in the shadows. It didn’t matter what this boy’s value as a weapon was if his words were capable of such tortures. She had to end this, and quickly.

“But Akur is lonely too, and you guys are just sharing your views with each other in the only language either of you understand. Destruction with the far off promise of creating something else after the other is destroyed”

This she knew… The boy’s point was valid, and not all that alien to her after all. She retracted her talons and acknowledged internally that she had gotten ahead of herself in the heat of his words.

“Very sharp of you. But you missed one critical detail” “Even amidst the destruction, there is good, and there is evil, and I choose to stand for the good”

Mirio nodded to give himself time to pace out his thoughts, no longer afraid of her monsterous form, seeing into the subtle natures that danced within her heart.

“But Ladon, the immortal and strong being that you are, surely you can see that if you accept that as truth. Then the distinction of good and evil no longer matter”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, aren’t you just choosing mayhem? And when you choose that path, intentions no longer matter. When a storm rolls in over the farmer’s fields, it can bring rain which can nourish the crops, but so too can the winds tear them from the earth, and the torrents in flooding everything, bring disease and ultimately death. Surely, the forces of good when out of control wield the power to doom just as surely as evil does. A storm of good and a storm of evil, neither protects anything!”

“Pffft” she said with a dismissal of her hand, “You don’t get it. If I ease off even an inch, the floodgates will open, he will rule over the realms unimpeded, and no one will have any chance for protection. Your world, and the chance for normality that almost everyone takes for granted, come from me” “All you know only exists because of the war that has been waged behind the scenes since the cataclysm”

“If that is true. Then there is more to your battle than good and evil. Why then only think of the solution in such a singular fashion? What if there is a compromise, or some form of redirection, some way to manage things better perhaps?”

“How naive of you to think that I have that luxury! And as a pawn in this game, neither do you!”

“Wait, just hear me out a moment longer”

“No, your words remind me of him. Capable of twisting any clear truth into another for your own purpose, all because they carry a song carried by your heart. You shall surrender yourself to your role, or I will no longer shelter the people you have known! Just as your brother fell, the people of the vale, those you have met in your journey, even that pet of yours, shall also fall. Refuse your role, and they will live to be tortured forevermore by their absolute irrelevance”

Mirio felt the impact of her words, they were no idle threat, it was clear that she held that power. He could not extricate his path from her own, and now just like her, he was forced to hold up the floodgates against a pervasive and oppressive evil. She was right, the luxury to do anything but resist, was too much to ask for.

“Shit”

The tide had turned, the battle of words he thought he had won, had merely led him to a bind he couldn’t escape.

He cast his gaze down and realized fully now, the weight she burdened, and understood how words could never draw the venom from its place in her heart.

It felt as if his heart had fallen in his chest, and his expression dropped along with it.

The depth of her pathos was now his own, and he was trapped within a prison no longer of the realm he was pulled into, but within his own soul.

“I won’t be your weapon” he said as he lifted his eyes, and stepped back towards the gate.

“You can’t leave!” she screamed.

“I have to”

FWOOSH

Mirio’s form dissipated like ash in the wind, to leave Ladon to her torment in the Abyssal realm.

…

Rose scrunched her nose up as a shadow appeared within the red glow of the gate, and soon after it manifested a man who walked backwards towards her at twice her height.

“Wait, wait!” she yelled as she ducked.

As Mirio manifested on the other side of the gate he felt something warm strike the back of his legs and before he could correct for it he was sent tumbling backwards.

“Shit shit shit”

“Ahhhh!”

“What the hell!”

“Who the heck are you?!”

“Who am I! Who are you!”