Damien rushed to the growing flames and ripped his shirt off, trying to smother them. It, along with his hands, passed right through the fire without stopping. There wasn’t even any heat. Damien batted at the fire, but it was completely incorporeal.

However, the memories it was consuming were not. Some of the fragments had shrunk to the size of his palm, and it wouldn’t be long before they started vanishing. Damien repressed the panic, running through all his knowledge to try and find a way to stop the fire.

He quickly drew a rune circle around the flame with his finger, attempting to remove the heat from it. A strong chill permeated the air, but the fire didn’t even flicker. It was on a completely different plane, untouchable to all of his magic.

Damien cursed, resisting the urge to stomp his feet like a petulant child. Mel had said this was a training exercise for mental energy. Even though the Void had commandeered her training exercise, perhaps some of the original intent still remained.

He extended a strand of mental energy toward the flame. Scorching heat instantly stung his senses, even though there were no nerves to feel with. He flinched back, his energy recoiling. That solved the issue of interacting with the fire. Unfortunately, it wasn’t doing much for actually putting it out.

Damien gathered as much energy as he could and molded it into a large dome. He set it down around the flame, trying to smother it. His skin prickled as his mind fired off pain signals for things that weren’t there.

Gritting his teeth, Damien ignored the pain. However, the flame showed no sign of sputtering. Worse, with every passing second, his energy grew more and more unstable. It sloughed away from the dome he’d made, running along the ground as if melted.

The dome collapsed and Damien staggered, the tips of his fingers singed. He stared down at them, then glanced back up at the fire. The fragments within it were even smaller now, some no more than a few fingers in width.

“Something tells me brute forcing this by ignoring the pain isn’t going to solve the problem,” Damien muttered to himself as he drew back his unresponsive mental energy and gathered it once more.

The flame had been changed by Void magic to some degree. He didn’t know enough about how it worked to know how, but if the faceless creature had said that the Void would consume him if he failed.

Damien ran back over the key points of their conversation, searching for clues. Henry’s warning against using Void magic before he knew enough about it rang in his head, but Damien didn’t have time to study any further. He didn’t even have time to be sitting around, thinking about what to do.

He reached out to the Void. There was no response. The world remained black, with no hints of gray to be found. Flames crackled merrily as the pyre prepared to consume him.

“Come on,” Damien muttered, straining harder. The lines on his body remained inert. It was like the Void wasn’t there at all. There wasn’t any time left to determine why. There was only one set of runes that he knew corresponded with he Void – the broken circle that had appeared once.

Damien didn’t know what the runes did, but he was out of options. He barely remembered the pattern, but as he retraced it in his mind, he felt the runes rising up from the back of his mind as if they had just been waiting for him to reach out.

He traced the circle in the air, leaving behind a trail of purple energy. The broken runes looked… wrong. There was no other way to describe them as the flame illuminated their warped edges.

Memories wrinkled, many no larger than peanuts. Damien prepared to release the spell, no matter what it did, but the sense of unease in his stomach reached a crescendo. If he cast this spell, something deep down told him that he would no longer be Damien.

His hands clenched and he took a step toward the flame, dismissing his fears. And then he paused. A flicker of recognition caught in his mind. There was no time to do the modification, but he did it anyway.

With a sharp twist of his hand, Damien drew a line around the center of the rune circle. He twisted the two halves. Broken runes connected, forming into whole ones. They were identical to the circle within his mind that he used for direct casting, just with a single difference.

In the center of the circle was a single rune like nothing he had ever seen. Jagged lines twisted off from a large black dot, giving it the appearance of an eye. Damien dismissed the circle in the air and reached inside himself.

Instead of casting the spell on the flame, Damien directed his mental energy toward the circle in his mind. Almost as if it had been waiting for him to touch it, new lines traced themselves into his psyche, creating the eye at the center of the circle.

A chill raced through his veins. His vision split and shifted, creating two overlapping versions of what he saw, but one was shimmering with gray light. In the gray plane, the a staff with a dilapidated, unlit lantern hanging at its end sat, waiting. The lantern creaked in an unfelt wind.

He reached out, gray wisps of smoke rising off his hand as he pierced through the planes and wrapped his fingers around the rough wood of the staff. It was ice cold to the touch. With a lurch, Damien pulled it into his own plane.

His body screamed in protest as foreign Ether scored his veins and pumped into his core, but Damien didn’t let go of the staff. There was a sound like shattering glass, and his core shattered.

With a snarl, Damien extended his mental energy, wrapped in a layer of gray light, and grabbed the fragments. He crushed them back together, wrapping it in a tight ball that flickered with Void magic.

The pyre roared. A memory curled and vanished, consumed. Raising the staff, Damien thumped it into the ground at his feet.

“Obey.”

With a screech, the lantern’s shutters slammed open. A violent gale ripped the pyre apart and the fire leapt like a trained dog, vanishing into the depths of the staff. The shutters snapped back shut, but a faint glow still emitted from between them.

Gray light worked its way into the darkness around Damien. The eye at the center of his rune circle etched itself into the ground, and he finally realized he knew what the rune stood for. It was him.

The darkness shattered, falling away as the forest returned. His staff faded as well, but Damien could still feel it in the edges of his vision, just waiting for him to reach out and take it again.

He blinked. His eyes were crusted over and every single part of his body ached. He was still sitting in Mel’s rune circle, but judging from how he smelled, he’d been here for a while. Damien groaned, slowly rising to his feet and ignoring the pops as his legs protested the sudden movement.

The damage to his core had remained. A quick mental check showed that it was in thousands of pieces, held together only by Void magic. Damien extended a hand and a gravity sphere formed within it. He let out a relieved sigh and dismissed the spell.

Damien tried to figure out what memory the pyre had consumed, but he had no idea where to even start. It wasn’t like he could know what he’d lost if he’d forgotten it.

“Damien?”

He turned. Mel stood behind him, her eyebrows raised in shock.

“I do not like your training exercises.”

“You finished a day early,” Mel said slowly, Ether gathering around her hands. “How are you feeling?”

“Horrible.”

“Really? That’s brilliant,” Mel exclaimed. “I can’t believe it. You did it!”

Damien spat onto the ground, trying to get the sour taste out of his mouth. He studied the runes on the ground, confirming a suspicion that had only just arisen in his mind. “You knew, didn’t you? These runes call to the Void.”

“I did,” Mel said. “I couldn’t tell you the truth. It might have affected the results negatively. I was warned very firmly about that. The highest chances of success occur if you have no idea what was happening beforehand.”

Damien stepped over the runes, rolling his shoulders. “And who told you that? Was it Delph?”

“No,” Mel replied. “Not exactly. It was Havel.”

“He’s the first one, isn’t he?” Damien asked. “The first Void creature. The one the faceless one made.”

“He is,” Mel said with a nod. “Havel wouldn’t tell me anything else, but he said that the only chance we had at surviving this Cycle would be if you went through with this.”

“Did he tell you what would happen if I failed?”

“That I would die, and the rest of us would probably follow shortly afterward.”

“Well, at least he was honest with somebody,” Damien said, shaking his head to try to clear the fog out of it. He wasn’t sure if he was angry, disgusted, or just exhausted. He’d been manipulated again, but he couldn’t deny the need for power in the face of the Corruption.

“How does it feel?” Mel asked. “The Void, that is. You can see it now, right?”

“Hungry,” Damien replied. “Hungry and empty. Where is Sylph?”

“Still training with Havel. She’s not done yet.”

Damien extended his senses. Strands of Void magic reached out, tracing across the ground like a faint fog. The world felt completely foreign to him, but there was one thing that he instinctively knew he could recognize without a doubt.

The faint flickers of Corruption, mixed with darkness and comfort and moving at an incredible speed. A tiny flicker of a grin crossed Damien’s face as he located Sylph a few minutes into the forest.

“What about Henry? Did he know?”

“No. He completely believed me, and he’s been helping Sylph train to avoid bothering you. I doubt he would have let me do this if he knew the truth. I had to add the Void runes later, while he was distracted.”

Damien grunted. “If he finds out you almost offed me, he’ll probably try to kill you.”

“I know,” Mel said, her lips quirking up. “I’m not without defense, and I did what I had to. I don’t want this Cycle to end either, Damien. Havel said there was only one way out of this where we had a chance. I did what I had to. So did Delph.”

Damien Warp Stepped, appearing in front of Mel and driving his fist into her chin. Her head jerked back and she slammed into a tree behind her with a grunt.

“That was for the memory you cost me,” Damien said. “But I think I would have done the same thing. I don’t recommend being nearby when Henry finds out, though.”

“Noted,” Mel said, grimacing as she pushed away from the tree and rubbed her chin. “You’re faster than before.”

“I’m more than I was before. We’ll just have to see if it’s good nor not,” Damien said. He teleported again, setting off in Sylph’s direction, leaving Mel behind him.