The new tower soared sky high.

But aesthetically it was an eyesore. It was too big, and as a result my imagination failed to catch up. There were severe design flaws too and while I had dreamt of the tower to be geometrically an elongated cuboid with a pyramid attached to the top, it looked more like a curved banana.

The trees had been relatively small and easier to create, as I could just conjure one tree in my mind and copy it until I had a forest. No wonder the trees of the forest beyond the field were identical clones of each other, now that I observed.

Like its predecessor the tower was doomed.

The whole building tipped over to one side, our side. It was going to crush us.

“A tower needs a deep foundation!” Fono yelled at my ears. “You don’t imagine such a big building just sitting on the land!”

“You should have told me!”

An adjustment as simple as a new thought that the tower was falling in a different direction could have saved us. But the urgency of the moment knocked our wits cold. A very basic instinct for survival took over us and we ran.

But I was lagging behind, my legs incomparable with Fono’s huge pillars that covered a dozen meters in a single stride.

Fono groaned in exasperation. He came back to grab me, even as the sky overhead darkened, the tower blocking the sun and casting a shadow all around us, mere seconds away from turning us into pulp.

Fono launched himself sideways in the nick of time, hurtling himself out of the shadow.

Soon after a great incomprehensible sound tore our eardrums as the tower smashed against the ground.

As Fono landed, he skidded and lost balance. We were at the edge of the field and a tree came in our way. To prevent me from being smacked against the tree, Fono flung me in another direction.

I landed on my arms roughly and rolled to a stop, only to watch as a detached chunk from the top of the tower, sent flying by the impact with the ground, hit Fono and he collapsed like an oak tree, unconscious. Not seconds later, a skull-sized debris boxed me in the face.

I slumped to the ground, my nose leaking warm blood and a splitting pain on my forehead. I felt dizzy, like I was about to pass off into a sleep, a forever one.

In a remote region of my mind a voice squeaked that everything was just going on inside my head. If only I stopped believing in the reality of my situation I would be saved.

I focused my mental energies and visualized the mist. The white, boring mist where nothing ever happened. I held on to this one thought resolutely and before long the pain on my forehead faded and my nose seemed to have mended.

I peeped out through my eyelids.

Fono grunted from some distance away. “Whoof, for a moment I thought I was dead.”

I pushed myself up to a sitting position. A window appeared in my vision.

You have gone without evilese for far too long!

The privilege of being a neutral one has been taken away from you!

Change of Affinity is a Crucial Event, as such a reversal of the effects of the timebomb has been triggered in relation to you.

You turn into the Evil King in… three…two…one… Now!

An uncontrollable tremble rocked my body. My heart palpitated. Stars flashed in my vision. Even the mist disappeared. Now there was only blackness.

***

Mimti’s heart was broken.

Cruelly shattered into a thousand pieces and thrown into a waste heap that stank of faeces.

I hadn’t expected such a betrayal. Never from my wife, the woman whom I loved more than my life.

The moment I had lifted up the bed sheet to reveal the buck naked forms of my wife and the man, I had gone numb, because I had not known how to react.

My wife began to make odd sounds with her mouth, as if trying to explain herself. There was horror in her eyes, more than there was guilt. But there was nothing to explain. There was nothing that she could explain, and after a couple of moments she burst into tears. Was she afraid I would murder the two of them?

The man leapt from the bed and backed as far away as he could from me to a corner. He was scared I would hit him and he kept furtively glancing at my wife like he was worried for her safety too. His behavior made me want to chuckle. I wasn’t going to hit them. There was nothing that I could get from causing harm to them.

With a sign of resignation, I walked to the main door of the house and unbolted it. I remained clung to the door for almost a minute, dwelling on my laughable fate. Finally I exited the house.

It didn’t take me long to realize that my legs were taking me towards the cave where I made all my sculptures. A question swirled in the gray matter inside my cranium: What could have compelled my wife to cheat me?

I had given her all the love that I could. Sure, I had to stay away from her sometimes so that I could work on the sculptures in the cave, but I needed the silence and the solitude to focus on my art.

My sculptures were my source of living. They brought food, clothing and shelter for me and my wife. So it was a necessity. Didn’t she see that I stayed away from her only because I loved her?

Yes, I was a few years older than her, but all the same I wasn’t so old either that it should make her wish for the arms of a younger man.

My vision became blurry and only when I wiped my eyes did I realize I was crying. Oh, it was all so senseless!

A violent anger stirred within me. Blood rushed to my face and I balled my hands. It was all the man’s fault. He had coveted my wife and wooed her in my absence. People like him were comparable to vermin in society.

The bastard had moved into the village recently. I didn’t know his name, but I did know that he lived in the far end of the village and was a blacksmith. But he was not some love starved youth. He was nearing middle age and had a wife and kids too.

How would his wife feel if she got to know about her husband’s backstabbing? And obviously this was not the very first time that he had been my wife’s intimate guest. He must have been a regular morning visitor on all those days when I was away, putting my heart and soul into my statues.

If I hadn’t broken my routine of returning home at noon, I would have never learnt about my wife’s infidelity. I thought of all the times I must have loved my wife, blissfully unaware that she had been spreading her legs for another man.

When I reached my cave, I collapsed onto my knees.

I glared at the half-finished structure inspired in part by my wife.

The rage took over me and I wrestled with the sculpture as if it was to blame for everything and I threw it to the ground.

“Why?” I asked in between sobs “Why?”