Chapter Twenty-Eight.

I told him as much as I could— which wasn’t a lot, really. My guilt aside, there really wasn’t much to tell about my former minions. The last of them had only just evolved when I’d had my disastrous fight against Dezzahn and I’d barely even seen their abilities used. Weakness? Fire. Strong against physical attacks thanks to their nature as a semi-liquid. We’d already seen the [Blightstalker] and its predator-like ability to turn invisible when attacking. Theo and Itchy had both become [Blightguards], with heavy armor and the ability to regenerate as long as they had energy. Spook became a [Blightwatcher] with a level of sensory perception that could melt brains. Pollo and Gnaw became [Blightshapers], and of all my minions these were the two that worried me most when I considered what a monster like Dezzahn could use their powers for.

They were totally useless in direct combat, their bodies defenseless and bloated. However… in just a few minutes, they’d managed to partially reanimate a dead Kaiju and use it to fight off Dezzahn long enough that we could escape. They could inject raw [Blight] into living creatures and mutate them horribly into warbeasts. Hell, Pollo had been creative enough to make our monstrous blight-worm transport even before he’d evolved. With enough copies of those two loose in the Kaiju graveyard… things could go bad up here fast.

After spilling everything I knew about my old [Blightlings], the captain dismissed me while he set about making his own plans and preparations. If he had any suspicions about the source of my knowledge, he didn’t voice them and I didn’t open my mouth to share. Stumbling with exhaustion, I left the bridge— without unloading a whole bunch more of my past on someone for once.

Lesson learned. Some secrets are just plain need-to-know.

I briefly thought about finding Shani, but with the cores down she was definitely busy and I didn’t want to distract her. Yep. Totally not embarrassed about my outburst or anything. Just gonna avoid that one…

I really should stop avoiding my problems.

Sighing as I walked down the hallway, I tried to reason out why I was avoiding her. She clearly knew what had happened last night— I’d felt her magic joining with mine to burn out the horde— but right now I just felt… raw. Too raw to talk about why, and that’s something I would have to share with Shani. I just didn’t feel like it yet, so avoidance it was.

Later-Ray could handle the problems, I’m sure that with the benefit of his future experience he’ll have the perfect solution. Current-Ray needs sleep.

Sealing the door to my cabin, I guiltily thought about the villagers as I looked down at my bed. It gnawed at me in the back of my mind before I could push it back— how many of them had just died last night. The utter despair in the eyes of those gathered around the pyre was an image I just couldn't shake. I owed it to them to help, somehow, because they had no one else. But I could barely keep myself upright at this point, almost tripping over my own feet as I crossed the room.

Not helping anybody like this. Sleep. Then you can go try to convince them you’re a hero.

Carefully stripping off my clothes (because sometimes I can learn from my mistakes and I'm burning through my clothing stockpile alarmingly fast) I crashed down onto the tiny bed. My eyelids felt impossibly heavy, but I still felt the urge to make some kind of plan for—

—Black tendrils burrowed through my body, slithering across my soul in a way that made me shudder at the violation. I could feel them taking something from me, stealing important pieces of myself to the monster that held me in an inescapable grip.

“Is this all you are, flesh-thief?”

The words wracked my mind, spears of psychic pain stabbing through my consciousness agonizingly as I screamed.

“Is this all you have become?”

Another blast of agony flowed through me.

“Too busy enjoying yourself and wasting your days to prepare yourself for our confrontation, and now it is too late.”

The tendrils dove deeper, piercing into my soul and slowly tearing me apart.

“You are too weak— just like last time. You will fail— just like last time. And when you do, you will run. Leaving all your new ‘friends’ to pay the price in your stead. Just. Like. Last time.”

Searing pain blinded me as I was ripped to pieces, darkness creeping along my fading consciousness until everything was black. I was dying, and in desperation I broke the seal on my soul. A roar of defiance ripped out from my broken shell, and the darkness came alive as Anathema awoke.

Black fire exploded outwards, burning through the monster until the apocalyptic flame had devoured even the memory of Dezzahn. I felt a brief moment of victory, but the fire didn’t stop. Freed of its cage, the destined death of worlds would accomplish its purpose.

Fire spread through the ground, the air. Space itself began to burn as the world warped in pain. I saw the Duchess melting like slag, panic in the crews’ eyes for the briefest seconds before they were incinerated. Shani looked at me pleadingly, mouthing something that I would never hear as the air was already gone. Sound was gone. And then she was gone too.

Leigh, Bhartolo, Cade, Teadran, all vanished in moments. The fire spread.

Delmoth burned for an instant, and I saw betrayal in Joan’s eyes before she disappeared. Anathema clawed deeper, spreading through the planet in an unstoppable tide. My [Blightlings], held prisoner below by Dezzahn, were free for only moments before the fire consumed them. The world crumbled in, and I saw Murgui at the world’s core shake his head sadly before the encroaching darkness devoured it all.

Everything was gone. I floated in black emptiness, staring out at nothing. Because there was nothing left. Anathema had destroyed my enemy and extracted its price. Empty eyes looked out at an empty universe.

Forever.

— a tortured shriek rent the air as my claws impacted the wall, tentacles lashing out ineffectually at enchanted steel with blind terror as I struggled to rip myself out of the nightmare. The cramped confines of my cabin pressed in around me— barely large enough to contain my transformed body and trapping me in place. My heart raced in my chest and the need to get out screamed in my mind as the room constricted around me like a coffin.

I wriggled in place but couldn't get past my own bulk to reach the door. Panic made my motions increasingly frantic as I struggled to breathe. I needed to transform back, but the moment I tried it just increased the sense of pressure I felt around me— my mind blindly insisting that I wasn't getting smaller, the room was. Magic flooded into the limited air in the room as I flailed in terror, my control faltering. Pain rushed through my overstressed mana channels at the involuntary action, but the pain was a blessing in disguise. The connection to my soul-space stretched out in front of my beleaguered consciousness; a shimmering lifeline that I clutched at like a drowning man in a dark ocean of fear.

There was the familiar sensation of falling, and then suddenly I was floating in the limitless starfield of my soul. Shaking, I curled in on myself and just… drifted. Soaking in the soothing light of countless stars, I did my best to not think at all for a while.

I don't know how long it took for me to calm down, but eventually my breathing slowed and I was able to start taking stock of myself.

That was a bad one.

It wasn't the first nightmare I'd had in the last few weeks, but it was definitely one of the worst. They were all usually variations on the same theme and I could normally handle it with some deep breathing while I forced the memories back. However the… events of last night must have given my subconscious some extra fuel to torment me with. Transforming in the tiny space of my room definitely hadn't helped with the aftermath either.

Reflexively, I uncurled myself and stretched out as wide as I could go. The soul-space was a perfect refuge. A place under my absolute control that only I could reach. I could float between the stars as long as I wanted—

—you will run away, just like last time—

I flinched, the words hitting me like a slap.

I didn't. I didn't run, I was…

—too weak—

I wanted to deny it, to insist that these were just the words of an enemy trying to undermine me. An enemy that I'd gotten away from long ago. Of course, I'd forgotten the one enemy I couldn't escape— Myself. And the voice of my subconscious condemning me was right— I was too weak. As things stood, if I encountered Dezzahn again right now my options were to either try to run away or unleash Anathema and risk burning myself out.

Along with possibly everything else…

Shuddering, I pushed back the memory of my nightmare with a shake of my head. The more I came to grips with Anathema in my mind, the less I wanted anything to do with it. It was too much for me— too much power, too much risk, too much attention. It should be centuries before I was on speaking level with gods, not when I was only… uh…

Huh. How old am I?

Joan had said I looked ‘near twenty’ but… I couldn’t remember. The more I focused on trying to recall any details, the more they just slipped away like I was clutching a receding tide with my bare hands. Guess that’s something else I sacrificed to fuel my rampage down below. There was so much I left behind in the name of survival…

Looking through my memories of myself there was nothing, just a murky grey void. I could remember reading about a freaking analytical engine and my old email password but I couldn’t even remember my age. At this point, the only thing left of the person Raymond Baines was his name. It had cost me so much to get that back after being transformed into a monster, but now the victory felt hollow. I had taken back my name, but sacrificed everything that gave the name meaning in the process. It reminded me of what my path vision/possible future self told me when I tried to argue about my name.

“Raymond is who you were. It no longer encompasses all that you are, what you have become and will yet become. One day you will grow beyond this name as well, and it is not a sad thing.”

It had looked at me with ancient eyes full of pity as it said those words. Circumstances (and my own tendency to avoid uncomfortable topics) had kept them from my thoughts afterward, but now… I couldn’t help but wonder if the dragon-me was right. Maybe Raymond didn’t survive the Deep Hollows after all, and I’ve been clinging to a delusion ever since.

Ray had used Anathema to escape an impossible situation, but there is a cost for using that kind of power. In this case… it wouldn’t be wrong to say he died for it. The pieces that made up Raymond Baines had almost entirely been consumed by the time I came back to life again, leaving only what had been born here. Where Ray died, Kosimar had survived.

A moment of dissonance swept through [Cosmos], the stars of my inner realm trembling for an instant before stabilizing. I looked around worriedly, but other than the brief disturbance everything seemed ok.

Uh… alright then, that wasn’t ominous at all.

Maybe this is just me overthinking and trying to compensate for what I’ve lost. It’s a moot point anyway, because there isn’t a way for me to recover the bits of my past eaten by the literal embodiment of the apocalypse. Moving forward I could either mope about something that couldn’t change, or I could decide that I was going to step away from the scraps of who I’d been before. Try to figure out who I would become in a new world. It wouldn’t change much about my situation now or what I’d already been through but… it was something. And maybe coming to grips with my past— or lack thereof— will help me sort out my issues in the present. If that means taking on the name Veris gave me as a symbol of this choice, then I’m at peace with that. Mostly.

Well ok, it wasn’t like I was gonna go around declaring my ‘new’ name to everyone after this little revelation— because the thought of doing that made me physically cringe with embarrassment— but I could at least start letting go of some weights in the back of my mind. It felt like I was taking a step forwards for once—

Another tremble swept through the [Cosmos], and I looked around with a little annoyance this time.

“Alright, either do something or pipe down because I’m having kind of a personal moment here and the interruptions are not cool.”

Everything was almost suspiciously quiet after that (I don’t know how stars can manage to twinkle with innocent nonchalance), which let me refocus more on my impending doom instead of my newfound identity crisis.

Congratulations, Kosimar, you’ve solved the issue of your name. Now, about the whole, ‘giant horrible monster coming to kill everyone’ thing? If you’re not gonna sleep, you should probably get on that.

Sleep was definitely out of the question for a bit. Even in the calm environment of my soul-space, the idea of possibly facing that nightmare again was too much. Which left taking an inventory of myself and what I’d learned in the last fight.

Shani had been right about magic being easier when I was transformed. All the lessons she’d been trying to teach me the last few weeks while I struggled had just clicked into place. I wasn’t any kind of master practitioner or anything yet, but when I’d called to it my [Stellar Flame] had actually answered. Fire responded to my will instead of just fountaining uselessly onto the ground. Even now I could feel how the connection to my stars in the soul-space had grown deeper. And speaking of stars, there was a new one.

Floating in a slow orbit around me along with my [Shield] and [Flight] spells was a tiny crystal star. It was the most powerful spell I knew, shimmering with the rune that my Ideal had claimed for its own. On the battlefield it had been devastating as it unleashed mini solar flares that roasted the horde to a crisp. But I could feel even more from the little crystal.

Unlike the other two spells I learned so far, this one had an odd liveliness to it. Unfortunately, it seemed to have taken a queue from my own emotions at the time of its creation. The star radiated a feeling of pure malice and hostility, of concentrated destructive glee. This wasn’t a star for nurturing new worlds, it only wanted to burn everything down and bask in the ashes. I could sense how it would wield any power fed into the spell to disrupt enemies under its influence— eroding any hostile magic in range.

That must be what kept them from going invisible again. With this little… [Spiteful Star]? —disrupting their magic, they were sitting ducks. It’s perfect.

I wanted to hug the little crystal, but that would be weird. The question now was… could I make more spells like it?

Sweeping my consciousness through the spell, I tried to see how I’d actually made the thing. The obvious connection was through the [Cosmos] rune, meaning maybe it had learned from my subconscious connection to the Ideal? Looking closer at it though, I immediately noticed something odd about the spell.

It started as just a slight feeling of wrongness, but it grew sharper the closer I looked. The spell was mine, and everything in it was mine but… it wasn’t all me. Buried deep in the crystal was a tiny little spark that was marked with another copy of my rune. Panic blitzed through me for a second at the thought that someone had infiltrated my soul, but closer inspection showed it was still my rune, not something from the outside. Furthermore, the rune’s origin was familiar.

Wait, isn’t this one of the villagers’ runes? One that was broken last night…

Sorting through the mental list took me a minute, but my connection to each of the [Cosmos] runes was strong. It wasn’t long before I narrowed down the source.

Face-paint guy? If his rune was broken, that means he probably died. But why is it…

I locked onto the little spark, floating merrily inside my latest, most animated spell.

Oh no. No no no-no-no.

Abandoning my soul-space, I fled back into my real body. No longer completely panicked, I managed to push past the discomfort and quickly transformed. I dressed hurriedly and sprinted out of my room, practically running head-first into Leigh in the hallway.

“Ray, I was looking for you. Listen, we need to talk about—”

“Not now,” I hissed, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him along with me. “There’s a dead guy in my soul!”