The forest felt weird, and Pit was worried. He padded silently through the underbrush, tail swishing through fronds and scattering droplets of early morning dew. His internal world, the forest of his home, was quiet…save for the rattling thrum that emanated from the tree at his center.

“What a strange noise,” he muttered, stepping closer to the spiraling roots. Branches hung low, heavy with the fruit of Pit’s Skills, each one a glimmering pattern to the tenku’s eye. These were not the source of the sound.

The trunk reached upward for a great distance, weaving around itself in a tight knot of wood and bark. It was composed of several smaller trees, bound tightly around one another and leaving space for a curious gemstone, pulsing with an intermittent beat and shaped as a four-point Nymean Star.

This was the source of the sound, and it ratcheted to a higher volume the moment Pit’s attention fell upon it.

“Why?” he asked no one. His friends were on the outside, and not even Felix could hear him. Not when he was submerged in that nasty Hunger. Pit’s tufted ears drooped. He had entered into his core space to help Felix with his efforts, if only by passively boosting his Companion’s Harmonic stats, but that left Pit with a ton of time to sit here. Thinking. It had been enough to drive him to explore his core space, and only the noise had brought him back.

It sounded like a rockslide but far too heavy, and an echoing howl that lifted his hackles. The gemstone at Pit’s center, his core, emanated the sound as if from down a long and narrow chasm. Pit’s gut lurched, the noise triggering something in his Mind that half-convinced him he wasn’t on solid ground, but free falling. It wasn’t the giddy rush of flight, or the aggressive drop of a leap, but a terror that gripped him as shadow swept out from all directions to swallow everything that he was—

“Felix?” Pit gasped. He sent his thoughts scurrying across their bond but, as before, felt the message dissolve against an invisible barrier. “This doesn’t feel like Felix. It should. It should!”

Their connection was strongest at Pit’s center. In fact, the fruit of Etheric Concordance, their bond Skill, hung closest to the four-pronged gemstone. The feel of Felix was normally here, like a cloak thrown over everything, but it was being choked away by that sensation of plummeting descent. The sound of it tasted cold and stale, an echo across an endless expanse, reverberating like the ghost of something that was once natural.

Is this…is this the Hunger?

Pit knew the plan, knew what Felix was attempting, but this—

Everything shook.

“Squawww!” Pit cried out, spreading his paws and wings for balance as the entire forest was jostled. “What?”

Again. The earth heaved and trees swayed, ripping from the dirt and toppling. Savage pain lanced across his breast, a deep, icy ache that compounded with every fallen branch. Pit stumbled forward, eyes fixed on the woven trunks of his core, and on the gemstone that was still vibrating with a rumbling detonation. It quivered, harder than the forest around him, as if it were trying to rip itself free of his core space.

“Stay still!” Pit demanded, throwing his Willpower and Intent at the thing. Vines and branches grew across it, lashing over the four points of the glowing gem and binding it tight. They immediately began to wither, splintering almost too fast for Pit to keep up.

Felix! What are you doing?

“Oh crap, this hurts way more than you said, Felix!”

Beef shouted into the light, his mouth burning every time he opened it. He’d been all but blinded once the stormwall of Primordial Essence had hit him, flooded with an incandescent, burning radiance that shined inside of him as much as outside. Closing his eyes did nothing against it, and Beef hadn’t ever been all that good at shutting down his Perception or that weird Affinity stat.

His everything was vibrating, and holy balls was that the worst.

Beef’s core space had been rendered down to soup once the stormwall had hit him, turning even his central most area into molten light. It swirled around him now, his old, familiar room indistinguishable from the maelstrom, and Beef tried to stop being sad.

It’s just stuff! It wasn’t even real! Beef lifted his trembling arms, empty save for the light that burned against his skin and singed his fur. Focus! Corral it, like Felix said!

He pressed the potency around him. Not just the Primordial Essence, but the pieces that made up his power. Even Hallow. His oldest friend on the Continent had vanished the same moment the Primordial Essence engulfed them, with neither a word or a cry. Just—just gone. That had hurt a lot, and Beef was putting a lot of effort in not thinking about it too hard.

Focus! he reminded himself. She’ll come back if you do this right! Spin it and compress!

Felix had gone over this process, the elevation from Actualization to the Ring Stage of core development. He’d said it was painful, and he hadn’t lied, but Beef felt the guy had left out some crucial details. The power he was wielding was so vast that it was slipping from his grip with every second that passed. It still was contained in his core space, such that it was, unable to flee the bounds of his Aspects thanks to Felix’s special Skill; but condensing all of the Primordial Essence and Beef’s own remarkable strength was beyond him.

I need a foothold. A funnel, where I can create some, like, leverage. Beef’s memories flashed back to his gaming days, when he’d pull mobs in SwordLore using doorways and boulders to limit the numbers that could assault him and his team. I need a chokepoint!

Easier said than done, but Beef threw himself at the issue. With his core space rendered into Primordial soup, he had the rare chance to rebuild it as he wanted. That was easier said than done, however. Despite repeating it to himself as a mantra, focusing on a cohesive vision for his core space was way harder than anyone had told him it was—the last time he’d just sorta made it. The process had been almost complete by the time Isla had started teaching him more about it all.

I bet Felix had visualized his core space the right way in two seconds, he groused, attempting to order his thoughts. His Intent squirmed away from him like a fish. Bet he didn’t have to turn his first, lame attempt into slurry and start over.

Beef hadn’t seen his friend’s inner world, but he was sure it was cool. He was called “the Fiend,” of course it was gonna be cool. The way Evie had spoken about hers—even Harn’s—had convinced Beef that he had to have something just as fantastical. He wanted something awesome, something befitting the person he’d become.

Minotaur. Whatever. He bet Felix didn’t have posters on the walls of his core space, or anything from his home. The guy never talked about Earth unless Beef brought it up—for all that Beef threw himself into this new world, Felix was the one that was actually totally engrossed in life on the Continent. By comparison, Beef was skimming the surface, barely even making an impression—Unbound or not. So he tried not to talk about his home, to be more present in the magical world around him. After all, no one wanted to hear about growing up in the suburbs of anywhere, let alone his dumb town.

“...it’s fine if you want to play games. I was just hoping you could take a break sometimes. Come outside? I wanted to go on a hike this weekend…”

The moment the voice started speaking, Beef whipped his head around, but there was no source. No one was standing beside him in the light.

That’s…that’s my dad. “Dad?” he said, not caring if the light burned his gums. “Dad are you—are you here?”

A voice—his dad’s voice—emanated from the whirling chaos. “...I saw this cool beetle in the field yesterday! Look at its shell!”

“Oh, wow. That’s really shiny,” said another voice, one that Beef was horrified to realize was his own. It sounded so incredibly high and small.

“It’s called iridescent, meaning it shows different colors when viewed from different angles,” his dad said.

Dad… Beef remembered these words, this conversation. As he recognized that, the brilliant madness swirled and formed into the shape of his old dining room table. Seated at the table, his dad was leaning over and showing a younger version of Beef—of Michael—a shiny bug. And behind his back was a plastic bag, hidden at the edge of his chair.

“It’s cool,” Michael said, pretending not to be interested at all. Beef frowned at that. “I guess.”

“Glad you think so. But I know you don’t love my job stuff. So, here,” his dad said, pulling the plastic bag open and handing a white cardboard box to Michael.

“What! Dad!” Younger him ripped into the box, going absolutely feral as he unwrapped a several piece statue of his favorite character from SwordLore, his favorite MMO. It was a heavily muscled woman wielding a battle axe, one of the story mentors. She was also really pretty, but Beef had never admitted that. In fact, Michael blushed when he realized his dad was watching him stare at the figure, but still leaped to his feet to hug the man. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“I know you wanted to start your collection,” his dad said with a laugh. “You like this one, right?”

“I do! She’s my favorite!”

“Good!”

Beef was smiling, the memory bringing back so many other things. That had been three years ago. He could ignore the pain while looking at that scene, the memory made into a movie, but before he knew it the tableaux vanished. “Hey!” he protested.

A LIE.

That face of bones reformed in the maelstrom, looming so high that Beef had to crane his head back to see it all. It’s voice was like the light; so utterly pervasive that it vibrated inside his chest and head.

“Gah! You again! What lie?”

THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES.

“I repeat, bone man: what lie?” Beef gritted his teeth against the burning agony. “That was a memory. A good one, too! It wasn’t a lie.”

LIES ARE MORE THAN WHAT IS SAID, BEEFHAMMER.

The memory came back, resummoned from the storm, but this time from a different angle. This time, Beef saw the stack of papers sitting on the table, half-hidden in another plastic back. Divorce papers.

The memory flashed, changing to show Beef’s old room. It was days earlier, and Michael was huddled on his bed, listening to his parents fight somewhere downstairs. Tears streaked his little face, but it was half-buried in his oversized pillow.

Beef grimaced. “So maybe not the best memory. What’s your point? What does this have to do with anything?”

The bone face of the Primordial was alien. Disproportionate and possessed of bizarre expressions, it still conveyed a sense of emphatic sorrow. A heaviness that threatened to smother Beef entirely.

LIES CONTAIN TRUTHS. YOU MUST CONFRONT YOUR LIES TO SEE IT.

“See what?” Beef asked, his agony only half due to the light. “What lies? That my parents were, like, shitty at being married? Duh. I don’t need a bone face to tell me that. Ugh,” he grunted, the storm wobbling out of his grasp once again. “Damn it! I just need some help! Can’t you help me figure this out? It’s your power going crazy in here!”

I AM HELPING YOU, CHILD. YOU MUST ONLY LISTEN.

Beef paused, the memory of his room shifting. It moved closer to his window. To the latch that had, at the time, held the thing shut. Beef shook himself, and the memory scattered. “Can’t I just make a core space and be done with all this cryptic bullshit?”

CAN YOU, UNBOUND?

“Again,” Beef said through his teeth. “Fuck you. Yes. Yes I can.”