Trigger / Content Warning: graphic depictions of violence and bodily harm, self-harm behaviors, and implied sexual content. Please read with care. <3
The second hand's thumb and third finger cracked once more and another wave of pressure thundered outward from the Priest. Wave roiling and augmenting the air in a heat shimmer as it pulsed toward the raid.
Sera braced, threaded her mana and built as many shields as she could before the wave could hit her – stacking layers upon layers. But it was futile. It wasn't the same thing. The pressure arrived nonetheless, bypassing her shields entirely, and the pain burrowed into her brain with a sharp snap – sliding up her spine, into her forehead with a sting and disappeared once more. Felt something in her mind reorganize itself.
The blue interface detonated beneath every vision in the cavern simultaneously, once more:
A truth is walking towards you.
10…
The robed figures started again. Laughing cut instantaneously as desiccated heads swiveled toward the raid members closest to each one. Eyes pouring white. And they lunged forward – careening ditties and swiping swords pursuing the raid once more.
The first time the counter had appeared the raid had still been gauging, the wave hitting before the fight fully engaged. Now they knew what the counter meant and they were still fighting. The counter was ticking and both things were happening at once – the raid force had to hold the line against mummified bodies while watching a number they couldn't stop. Counting down toward something they knew they were afraid of. And that was worse than the first time.
The knowing.
9…
"How do we stop it–" someone's voice quivered, not a commander, a fellow guide – Eaton. Sera could hear the raw edge in his voice, fear from what he had just experienced. "How do we stop it, someone tell me how–"
Sera ignored him and ran forward, focusing on her guide work duties. All she could do was focus on guiding – otherwise the same fear Eaton had would chase her down. Clamped her thoughts down tight and pushed them away.
A truth is walking towards you.
8…
7…
Arlen, from somewhere in the formation, shouted something about building shields – tactical, she thought, but it wouldn't work. The initial burrow had bypassed her own, it was the wrong thing – like trying to wash away the ocean. The memory was going to arrive regardless.
6…
"Left flank, close the gap–" Joel shouted, snapping the formation back into shape where the panic was creating holes. His approach was different. He didn't acknowledge the counter, just focused on the next task. They couldn't stop it, they just had to live through it. But Sera could see beneath his set brow, there was fear set deep in his own blue gaze.
5…
A robed figure drove a sword deeply through a panicked esper's heart next to Sera. She pivoted immediately, leaving him for dead. Ran and guided the espers that were still standing. The psychic damage had done its duty – espers and guides alike crumbling from the mental attack. All she could do now was keep going. All they could do now was keep trying.
A truth is walking towards you.
4…
"I'm scared." Quieter this time. Someone close – she didn't look to see who. Another guide, from the register of the voice. They couldn't hold it anymore. "I don't want to look. I don't want to–"
3…
It was futile. It was going to happen. Sera could feel the panic rise from the raid with every second. The second hand's counter ticking behind the air of the cavern – not physical, not mana-based in any way she recognized, just present, the way the Priest had been present the whole time with its eyes closed. Waiting. Patient. Felt her throat release a gasp that didn't seem like her.
2…
She squeezed her eyes shut.
1…
"Endure!" Rena's voice cracked, rippling through the cavern. "Endure it and hold!"
0.
The Priest laughed, deep and throaty.
The truth has arrived, it said.
Something burrowed in Sera's mind broke free.
The black took her.
✦ ♡ ✦
Sera was looking at a ceiling.
It was high. Vaulted. Carved red stone, gilded gold at the edges where the firelight caught it – architecture that shouted elegant, refined, that the person who resided within was important. She stared at it for a moment without moving. Let the details arrive to her slowly.
Fit for royalty. Or close to it.
She scanned the room around her. Taking in the ornate fireplace – large, embers low, the kind of fire that had been burning for hours and was settling into its own warmth. Heavy red curtains surrounding a grand window. Moonlight pouring in from it, illuminating her form. Dark mahogany furniture chosen carefully and expensively, wrought into fine detail and pompous decoration by artisans many years ago.
She was in a large bed.
She looked down.
A man was lying beneath her. And she was sitting on top of him.
Light blonde hair against white pillows – the particular gold of it catching both the moonlight and firelight, prettier than she would have expected. Clear, crystalline blue eyes. The specific shade of a sky when it was early morning – when the day was just rising and people would yawn and stretch and bury their heads into their pillows for just five more minutes.
His eyes were open.
He was looking at her.
No – he was aimed at her. The eyes were open and blue and soft – soft, she thought, incredibly soft eyes. And– they weren't blinking.
They were not going to blink.
Ah, she thought.
The recognition arrived flat and complete, the management system performing its last competent operation before everything else arrived.
So that's what you looked like, she thought absentmindedly.
She held that for a moment. The circuit completing. She had been in his body seeing her face. Now, she was in her body seeing his. Both records existing simultaneously. The warm courtyard and this red room. The cheerful call across the distance and these blue eyes that weren't blinking.
Then she traveled downward.
His throat.
She stopped.
The moonlight was cold and the fire was settling and the room was quiet and his throat was – she made herself look at it, made herself see it fully. It was like Yoru's – just like his when she had bitten him, had tried to take his life. But this one – this one was much worse.
His body. Her body. The bed.
The white linen that wasn't white anymore. Matched the ceiling and the curtains now.
Looked further down towards his chest, a large gaping pit. Like claws had buried themselves into a human chest and ripped out flesh in chunks. White cracked bone peeking through. A bloody, ragged hole where a heart should have been.
She looked at her hands – raised them slowly and carefully turned them over. The palms, the fingers, the spaces between. Covered in a sticky dark residue. She touched her cheek. Something hot dripping off her chin. Brushed her tongue against her teeth – found her canines had points that shouldn't have been there.
A tang of salt and iron.
She was watching from inside – inside the body, viewing the experience like it was cinema – out of her control. She was watching herself from the past.
Noted how she, the girl, looked at her long strands of black hair in the firelight. The confusion and dizziness pulsing through her starving mind. The growing, dawning panic battling something raw and primal inside her.
What did we do, Sera called out.
Not to the girl she was watching through. Not to the room. Not to his body which lay there like it was asleep. The question was directed inward – at the beast. At the thing inside her vessel that had been there the whole time. The thing that was watching this with her.
It was silent for a moment before she heard a rumbling reply.
We were hungry.
Simple. True. No apology in it. No cruelty either. Just the fact, delivered as it was. They had been hungry. The hunger had been there the whole time – and there, he had been. Blue eyes, gentle soul.
Fresh, warm, inviting.
Below them, through the eyes, the girl on the bed began to scream.
Not a decision. Her mouth simply opened and the sound came out – high and broken and entirely foreign to her. And then her hands were on his shoulders, shaking him, his name coming out of her in the way she had said it ten thousand times in the warm courtyard – "Vaelenyr, Vaelenyr" – except this time it was the sound of someone trying to undo something that couldn't be undone.
"Wake up," she said. "What happened. What happened–"
Sera watched, half-numb, half-something else, her gut roiled with a horrid sensation that lurched around, unable to settle. The beast watched too. She kept her jaw set.
"No," the girl said. Her voice fracturing. "No no no no–"
She was shaking him – violently now, desperately. But his limp body didn't respond, his head only flopped and lolled about here and there while she tried to beg him into consciousness. But he was gone.
He was already dead.
The firelight was warm and the fire settled; and his eyes stayed open and soft – aimed at a face that wasn't there anymore. The face of the girl who had called his name cheerily across a courtyard was, also, gone now. That girl had been replaced by this, by the screaming and the blood and the thing she was still becoming. Whatever monster she was. It was.
"Kill me," she cried – to the air, to no one and everyone at the same time. She grabbed her now black hair, ripped it out in anguish. Tufts of it fell gently on the reddened fabric.
The plea arrived – high and broken.
"Kill me too," she pleaded – scratching at her arms, blood underneath her long, sharp nails refreshed with new supply.
Sera watched her past self say it and felt the words in her chest as if she was saying them now. She had said them then. She was saying them now. The memory and the present collapsing into each other at the edges. Felt bile rise to her throat.
"I can't. I can't– What did I do? Kill me too. Kill me too. Vaelenyr. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Kill me too–" she muttered, on repeat, over and over, scratching her cheeks, her neck, bits of flesh shredding with each desperate plea. Her ruby red eyes glazed and unfocused, tears falling and falling and falling.
The words dissolved, losing their edges, became an endless string of repeated prayers. A desperate chant. A plea to the void.
Sera felt the beast shift. Not the entity beside her.
The thing of the past.
Something enormous and old moving through the architecture of her earlier vessel, a thing that hadn't yet learned the rules, the one that had been hungry and hadn't known what hungry meant when it finally got what it wanted. The entity – before the leash, before the management, enormous and old and moving inside her crying vessel.
"Kill me too," the girl wailed.
It opened its maw.
Sera felt it happen.
A strange sensation of something crunching around who she had been. Not pain exactly. Cessation. Consumption that led to an ending. A thing completed, a thing destroyed – the girl she used to be, snapped shut and folded inward – dissolved into nothing inside her own vessel. Felt the girl's vision obliterated into nothing and her body collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
Her earliest memory was waking up in chains. She had always defined it as the beginning.
She understood now that it wasn't.
The darkness arrived once more like a crashing wave and Sera woke up, gasping, again in the cold light of the temple cavern.
✦ ♡ ✦
The cavern reassembled around her in pieces – the columns, the bright, expansive light, the Priest on its dais with its bottom-most palms still extended and its iridescent eyes still pouring. The formation less crumbled than before – still struggling, still processing, but Rena's command echoing in everyone's collective consciousness – the raid force finding their feet slightly faster, the commanders already calling adjustments before the last person had fully returned.
They had endured. They had to continue to endure.
Sera was on her knees again. This time, her palms were on the ground in front of her.
Something warm dripped down her upper lip.
Sera touched it without thinking. Her fingers came away red.
A nosebleed. She hadn't had one since – she couldn't remember – some fight with her Instructor. She pressed the back of her hand against her nose and wiped at it messily with her hand and forearm. Told herself to get up. The fight was still happening. The robed figures were still–
Her fingers grazed her mouth.
She froze.
Fangs – sharp points where there shouldn't be. Pointed edges that arrived only when the leash was slack and she let it.
But right now, she was in the middle of a formation. She was in the middle of a fight. She was a guide, a human, on a raid and the raid force was three rows deep in every direction and the Priest was watching from its dais and the robed figures were still moving and now – now, she had fangs. She hadn't let it out.
She clamped her hand flat against her mouth. Hard.
Contain it, she thought. Contain it. Squeezed her eyes shut. Contain it.
Something cold pooled through her veins. Not panic. Something colder than panic. Something like dread.
She pressed her mana inward toward her vessel. Into the architecture of herself – the core, the leash, the careful separations she maintained between what she was and what she performed. She found the beast was there – present, enormous, old – except it was not where it usually was. It was not behind the window. It was not at the end of the leash.
It was closer.
Much closer.
Felt its heated breath, or what she imagined was its breath, against the back of her neck.
The boundary she maintained – the one she kept alive out of necessity, the one that required active upkeep, the one she rebuilt every morning the way some people brushed their teeth – was thinner than it had ever been.
She shoved. Pushing the beast back violently. Pressing angrily, trying to reposition something large and very heavy that didn't want to be repositioned. She felt it resist. She shoved again. The beast moved, reluctantly, the way it moved when it decided to cooperate and wanted her to know cooperation was a choice it was making.
The fangs receded slightly. Not gone. Receded.
The beast grumbled in displeasure, hissed at her.
Why do you deny me?
Not a threat. Not cruelty. The question arrived in her own voice – her cadence, her register. Her eyes widened in dawning horror. Why did it sound like her?
Sera pressed her hand harder against her mouth. Swallowed thickly.
The fight was happening. The formation was reforming. Someone was calling her name – Hibiscus, from twenty feet away, shouting at her to rise.
Sera didn't rise – caught in her own thoughts. She didn't hear Hibiscus at all.
You killed him, she thought – at the beast – panic pooling in her veins, unable to file it.
No, it responded irritably, in her own voice again. We killed him.
You ate my memories, Sera thought angrily, desperately – pushing at its response. You ate everything! I– I had nothing left of him. You– You took it all.
The beast was quiet for a moment and then Sera felt it. In her vessel, in the deepest part of her, felt the beast look at her directly. Eyes glimmering in the dark, pressed its gaze harshly upon her.
You. Asked. Me. it– no, she said. Sera said.
Sera had no answer for that.
She had watched herself say it – beg for it, even. In that room, in that moonlight, against the firelight, with his soft eyes aimed at her. Eyes that only spoke of love and yet his dead gaze felt like judgment. She had asked and the beast had answered.
You killed him, she thought. Trying one more time. Frantic. Trying to put the weight somewhere outside herself. You killed him.
We killed him, she growled back.
Sera didn't answer. The raid and the ongoing fight were a distant noise around her. Felt feet trip over her body, weapons clashing around her, and espers shouting in frustration. Body parts crashing against her recklessly low form.
But Sera was lost, she was somewhere far away, crouched on the ground, alone with her own reckoning.
Hand still pressed against her mouth. Nosebleed slowing. The fangs still slightly there – she could feel them with her tongue. Closed her eyes shut and held her breath. Bent her head down, cradled it in her arms, stifled a sob.
Right, she thought. I killed him.
I killed him and–
I can't take it back.