When Randidly touched its edges, the memory responded eagerly; it had almost been waiting for him to approach. Light bent itself into shapes, building a small enclosed area in a split second. Despite his mental preparations, some part of Randidly still flinched when the scene that materialized around him was so familiar.

He stood in the interior of one of the seedy motels his mother drifted between after Randidly’s college departure. During those times he had come home to visit, he would spend just as much time tracking her down as he would actually hanging out with her. Randidly’s lip curled up in distaste.

He had forgotten those anxious and vaguely sick returns during his first year.

His attention scanned the surroundings. The offensively patterned blinds were shut and most of the room's illumination came from the blue-tinted glow of the television. The deadbolt had been thrown on the door and the bathroom light at the far end of the room was off. Draped across the couch in her underwear was… his mother.

Her snores were shockingly familiar, even though it had been so long since he had heard the noise. Just like her loud laughter, the shuddering exhale through her nose had marked the steady movements of the clock hands during his adolescence. Especially after Ezekiel left. When Randidly had heard the snores, some of the dread of the day passed. He could finally flip over onto his side and fall asleep. Or at least try to, before dawn crept in through the window and prodded him awake.

The room was messy. A cracked-open pizza box sat next to the couch, with some unsavory scents wafting out from its percolating contents. Crumpled beer can littered the floor, so many that it was impossible for them to have all been consumed in a single night. More piled up on the far side of the rumpled bed. A dirty t-shirt was dropped on the floor, taken off right before bed and also likely to be put right back on when Emilee woke up.

Seeing it made him acknowledge it. He ached to know the life she had lived. And for how she made him feel growing up, he had only been too happy to abandon her to face the dark impulses alone.

The television was muted, but it continued to move in a meaningless caricature of life.

Randidly sighed. She seemed so small and frail in the darkness. Especially compared to his current body. Her pale skin made it obvious she didn’t leave the apartment much. The roots of her hair were grey, revealing her age, and also indicating how long it had been since she cared enough to dye them.

Perhaps due to a dream, her fingers twitched in her sleep.

When he rounded on his emotional clone, standing over her inert form, Randidly’s eyes were narrowed with fury. “Why did you bring me here? This isn’t my memory. And also… this is before the Nexus arrived.”

Behind them, the muted television showed the reruns of bland comedies that hadn’t yet been tainted by the arrival of the System.

The grey projection tilted his head to the side as though confused by the question. “Whoever said this would be your memory? I just told you not to look. Just like you haven’t for years, even after the information was available to you with your powerful senses. Our powerful senses. Well, now you are here, despite my protests. So don’t try and take this out on me.”

Randidly turned and surveyed the room. “Then this-”

“Is how your mother dies.” The clone confirmed. “Since we are here, we will watch.”

Randidly pulled back his lips to reveal his teeth. “So you are cruelty or arrogance.”

Uninterested in his speculation, the clone turned away. Honestly, he couldn’t blame it; the truth was he was just trying to distract himself from the discomfort he felt being here. Even if it wasn’t his memory, the situation was all too familiar. Next to him, his mother’s chest rose and fell.

Just as Randidly opened his mouth to say something else, the world twisted. The System arrived in a surge of light, fury, and energy. Comets of pure energy tore through every facet of existence, rearranging their relationships. Randidly stumbled backward, dazed and blown away by both the immense movement of meaning around him, but also the lack of impact.

His mother hadn’t even woken up.

Obviously, Randidly had just been a normal human when the System arrived, but this time he was not. He observed it gulping down his home planet with the benefit of both his immensely high Grim Intuition and his Infinite Incendiary Filaments of the Dove Moirae. Even the tiniest foreign energy rushed to surround them was highlighted in neon colors.

The yawning maw of the Nexus grasping for a Seventh Cohort opened up and chomped down. A blasting, searing pattern of energy was woven through every aspect of their lives, becoming the underpinning on which everything functioned. Both of these things happened without any fight. The planet was helpless.

Yet that wasn’t even what made Randidly pale. No, it was what he could sense through the gaps of the Nexus’s ‘teeth’ that truly filled him with dread.

For a split second, he caught the tingling signs of another universe. One filled with immense power and glittering capability, a place of ancient history and alien races. Right as the moment the Nexus bit out and then dragged Randidly’s home planet back into it, several domineering perceptions slammed into the universal barriers. The few small tremors during the Nexus’s arrival weren’t even its own working, but powerful figures trying to get in.

The tremors stopped, the grip of the Nexus over the planet became seamless. His mother continued to sleep. Muttering an unintelligible phrase, she turned on her side.

Time accelerated, slipping easily past so that they two didn’t linger and watch her slumber. The effect was strange. The passage of moments felt sticky at first but gradually loosened. Outside, Randidly’s powerful senses could feel hundreds of people begin to die. It was almost farcical, to his senses, as individuals so stiff and slow they might as well be sleepwalking fled before tiny monsters that would have much chance of survival next to him as a gnat.

The System had come so long ago, it was difficult to recall the horrible, claustrophobic fear he had dealt with in the beginning.

Rage continued to build in his heart, feeling so many people die. Without understanding the System or its gifts, monsters tore through people with relish. Yet when one troll, carrying a bent bicycle frame like a club, wandered toward the flimsy wooden door to Emilee’s motel room, his temper really began to spike.

For all her sins, she was still his mother. He refused to allow this, even within a memory.

In his chest, Randidly’s Nether Core began to rev in a very familiar fashion. He spread out his significance and strengthened the memory to endure his descent. Despite the contradictory physicality of his current form, wisps of steam began to rise from his shoulders as his heartbeat quickened. Sure, he hadn’t been there at the time, but now that he watched this, he could at least-

For the first time, he felt the negative emotional core’s capability. Just like it, the power it wielded felt heavy and grey. It stepped forward and glared at him, blocking him from strengthening the memory. “No. You must watch. You must witness.”

Outside, the troll sucked in air through its broad and flat nose. Randidly could almost see its grotesquely swollen adam’s apple bob as it caught the scent of his mother.

His emotional sea began to boil, the emerald color in his eyes beginning to blaze as he met the grey gaze of the clone. “Get the fuck out of my way, right now.”

“I will not.” The clone’s reply was firm. As Randidly prepared himself to fight against this final emotional wound, an unexpected weight crashed against his shoulders. The pressure forced a gasp from his lips and threw his attempt to manifest into disarray. Insidious, clammy fingers grabbed at both his limbs and his emotional sea. Those hands raked their way through him inside and out, ripping his intentions to shreds as soon as soon as Randidly generated them. It did not damage him, simply impeded him.

The fire in his chest didn’t waver for a moment, however.

Randidly’s fingers curled into fists. He had made a mistake treating this clone differently due to its lack of aggressiveness; yet in the end, it came down to facing his emotions directly. The strange, implacable fingers the emotional core utilized were surprising in their ability to smother Randidly’s resistance, but at some point, heat just started forcing its way out through even a rainstorm.

And right now, Randidly blazed.

Outside the door, the lesser troll brought the bike frame around and splintered the soft wood. At the same time, the impact was enough to twist the metal of the bike and bend it away. The troll grimaced as it looked down at its tool. The bike clanged against the asphalt as it was tossed to the ground. Raising its meaty fist, the troll blew another breath out through its nose.

“Eh?” The impact against the door finally woke Randidly’s mother. She pushed herself up to her elbows, the couch sagging beneath her. Her eyes were blurry and bloodshot.

Randidly gathered up momentum in his internal world, gathering his influence despite the chilled fingers of the emotional core. His clone narrowed its eyes at him as his Nether Core began to rev with more force. Behind him, the Stillborn Phoenix raised its head, preparing to release a burst of gravitation force that would implode the head of the laughably weak troll.

Just as the monster’s fist broke through the door, Randidly felt himself choking on the chilling grey aura the emotional cyst unleashed. Despite his powerful Discretion of the Apostate Moirae, his mind reeled before the crushing explosion of emotion it unleashed upon him. The deepest and darkest of the emotional cores was right about one thing: it was part of him.

It wielded a part of his strength. A suffocating, strangling power that felt like freezing to death under waves of grey sleet.

For a few seconds, his mind blanked out. The essence that assaulted him nearly ignored his resistance; not only did he struggle against the entropy-esque aspects of the energy, but it also felt like he was being temporally bludgeoned as well.

His mind was too frazzled to be sure, but there was something strange about how affected he was. He fought in the present, while also being dragged down by the heavy chains of the past.

Despite the strange nature of the emotional torrent, it only took a few seconds for Randidly to tear his way through. Which meant his lucidity snapped back into place right as his mother sat up and opened her mouth to scream.

And had her head torn off her body by the swipe of the troll.

He heard the crack first, saw the jerky twist of the spine. The momentum of the troll’s thick fingers did the rest.

“You-” Randidly growled at the fourth emotional core, but his shoulder slumped. His mother’s blood splattered across the wall and began to drip down toward the discarded pizza box. He hadn’t been able to act. After pressing his eyes closed and trying his best to ignore the excited grunts from the troll. Part of him still wanted to shred it to pieces, but also his heart began to quake, being forced to stand by while she was murdered right in front of him.

She barely even recognized something was wrong. She had been hungover and bleary up until the point she died.

“Why?” Randidly grunted. He felt hollowed out. Despite the fact he had long suspected that his mother was dead, to have watched the act that killed her stabbed at him. Hearing the noises was even worse than seeing, so he opened his eyes again.

The pain of losing a mother was horrifying, but he had been steadily preparing himself for this. No, what really got him were the ways this loss resonated with so many others.

Randidly couldn’t bear to be powerless and watch those he cared about die. Not again.

“Don’t flinch before the truth; this is what happened.” The clone was oddly defensive, its grey power falling back around it now the moment of contention had passed. “I don’t mind you revisiting the past and making amends, but only when you couldn’t do right the first time. This… this would have just been pathetic, revisionist sniveling.”

“What do you mean?” Randidly demanded. Then something occurred to him as he view the slender and faded figure his emotions projected. “You… I understand. You are loneliness. That’s why you wanted to make me watch. Because-”

He halted in his speech; the look the projection gave him was withering. “Loneliness? That’s part of it, but just a scrap. And the reason I made you watch was that you could have saved her the first time; she was in a bubble city, you damned fool. You weren’t as powerful as you are now, but if you spread out your awareness past this tiny area… you can feel your past self. You just never looked for her.”

The clone folded his arms across his chest. “Why the hell should you get the chance to do something about it now when you couldn’t be bothered in the first place?”