And lo, the vile monster arose from the boneyard and set upon the both of them, a silver comet trailing a tail of purple flame and spraying venom that set ablaze and burned like CP-T, sticking to everything it touched. The Thinking and Primordial Selves did great battle with the thoughtform; innumerable scars were carved into the boneyard, its vast fields were charred and its lakes boiled, a million undecaying Devil’s Teeth littered the ground, many shattered by impacts against the Memory of Von Wickten. Eventually, the Primordial Self acquiesced, presenting itself to the Thinking Self, its form shifting to that of humanoid armor, its back waiting open for the Thinking Self to step in.

When at last the two merged, they at last possessed both the means to best the thoughtform. At the edge of a volcano Victor stood, having summoned the blazing fissure from the earth of his mind and cast the Memory of Von Wickten into its monochrome lava.

Despite everything, despite the truly impossible struggle… He still felt the Beast’s boundless anger threatening to encroach on his mind if he ever stopped pushing it back for even a moment, continuously forced to assert control. The struggle of self vs. self went on and on for an undefinable stretch of dream-time until he realized what sort of foe would truly be required to convey what he wished his Primordial Self to understand.

Despite his reservations, despite worrying that this might be some sort of mental trap the old man had planted, Victor conjured forth the thoughtform of Koschei the Undying, or at least a representation of him, not knowing what he looked like. A staff. A robe. A gaunt, shriveled countenance. From the sky he descended encased within a gigantic version of the Antediluvian Gem, shattering it from within as a crow-like laugh rang out over the bonefield.

By the wizard’s side, bones gathered and formed a copy of Victor’s own armored form, thrashing and screaming against puppet-strings that bound his berserk False Self to the dream-wizard’s fingers. The thoughtform was nothing more than an elaborate automaton, controlled by Gamma.

“Well done, grandson!” the fake Koschei laughed. “Now that you’ve foolishly split yourself, there is nothing to stop me from exploiting that boundless righteous fury of yours and taking your body for myself as a vessel! Here, do battle against evil forever in this dream-land, as your instinct dictates!”

Uncountable armies rose up all around. Von Wickten, Von Hoedorff, Pateirians, corrupt Boreans, monsters, any and every conception of an evil being from Victor’s mind spilled out and bled together, gathering into a vast roiling tidal wave of wretchedness.

Victor’s Thinking Self allowed the Primordial Self to run rampage, slaughtering evil beings without reproach or progress and clashing with Koschei and his puppet version of Victor the whole time. Every once in a while, he would push back his instincts and perform various tactical maneuvers to bind and cripple dozens at a time, or to set up minefields of buried Devil’s Teeth that erupted whenever False Koschei drew near, riddling him with holes.

Eventually, when the Primordial Self once more clashed with its puppet counterpart and found itself outmatched by Gamma-Koschei’s expert tactical sense, Victor felt something; he felt the rage subside, and a weird feeling as if the Primordial Self was asking him to use one of his tricks again, and just that he did.

Summoning Oculus from hundreds of kilometers away in an instant, he summoned a devilbone nozzle, blasting Fight the Night through it to both propel himself away and blast away his thoughtform foe. Not bound by real-world limitations, the immense pillar of black flame dwarfed his feat back at the Deterrence Fields by an order of magnitude.

SPIRALING DETONATION SIGN

DEVILBONE ARTS: FIGHT THE NIGHT -INNER WORLD VER.-

In moments Victor’s thought-body, that flawed merging of Thinking and Primordial Self, was blasted far, far away from Gamma-Koschei, the False Self, and their armies, back to that citadel in the depths of his mind where he had locked up his instincts for all those years, where they had grown into this rancorous beast.

Before he could do anything or think, something changed. Victor felt his Primordial Self’s armor form shift around him, pieces falling away until nothing was left. The pile of bones now left at his feet sprung into motion as if swept up in a dust devil, gathering fragments strewn about the ruined fort’s courtyard and forming into a bestial form all over again, yet… This one wasn’t savage; it was smaller, being nearly exactly as tall as Victor, and its tail ended not in a blade, but in a four-fingered skeletal hand. Its many segments called to mind the myriad tentative redesigns he had conceived of for Midnight Wolf.

Victor’s manifested Primordial Self stared him down, still being easily as tall as he… And it sat down.

The constant pressure, the incessant, voiceless demand of anger, it all receded, still there, but no longer pressing in uninvited. On his waist now was a belt - a many-segmented mass of bone, a slot in its right side waiting. In his hand, a key that fit the hole.

He slotted the key into its place and flame burst out around his hand. A half-turn.

“Fulfill my command and obey no other law.”

From the belt there came a terrible noise; half a growl, half the rumble of an engine, twisted into words.

“YES. MY. KING.”

In the distance, one could hear the raucous charging of a million feet and the satanic laughter of his grandfather’s caricatured self.

The Primordial Self leapt upon the Thinking Self, and its entire form unfolded and enveloped him. In an impossibly-brief instant, once more was he clad in an armor of bone, yet there was no flame. His hair protruded out of the helmet’s back, his face plainly visible through its front, for it was a huge skull, its jaws agape.

A second half-turn of the key.

“Ignition.”

The belt’s many segments came apart to the left and right, exposing a fanged maw in the middle as bonefire blasted out from its newly-opened gaps. Its maw snapped open, and within it was revealed a gemstone blazing monochrome. From the belt, the flame spread all across the armor, bursting out from its many small, seemingly purposeless gaps as well as the articulated rocket-nozzles on its calves, back, and arms. The helmet’s jaws snapped shut in front of Victor’s face, and the claw-ended tail which now sprung from the middle of his back reached for his staff.

REX OSSUM PYROS

TRUE UNION OF THE SELF

A WIZARD’S CLARITY, A WARRIOR’S FURY

BONEYARD STRIDER DAWNWOLF -ASPIRATION EMBODIMENT-