Chapter 1014 (1/2)

Vye’s eyes struggled to cope with the sudden change in light. Whereas she had just been within the warm caress of an immaculately sunny day, now she found herself wading in waist-deep mist. The brilliant sun was now a weak amber disk screened by layers and layer of deep grey clouds. There was no real noise here, just a soft howling that didn’t seem to emanate from the wind.

Still, although the scenery was strange, Vye did not waver.

Vye took a step forward and instantly she stiffened. Although it had previously seemed that she was in an endless sea of mist, a single step was enough to draw her even deeper into this strange place. The howling grew louder. The level of the mist had crept upward until it enveloped her whole body. She was swimming in endless darkness.

The vague disc of the sun had lost its power here. It was completely sealed away by the seething grey mist.

But that step also brought a vague outline into Vye’s view. Within the mist, something waited.

Panting, Vye stood as still as she could manage and did her best to calm her rising heart rate. She also grimaced and rubbed the bridge of her nose. This was an unwelcome place, devoid of life. Vye didn’t know how she had come to be here, but that really didn’t matter to her. At her core was the voracious desire to travel everywhere.

Even in this strange place of shadows and mist, even if whatever was at the core of this place didn’t want her here. Those truths only made her eventual triumph that much sweeter; these denials would not stop her forever.

So she took another step forward. The blurry figure in front of her became slightly more discernible. She seemed to be even deeper in that dusk-grey mist, approaching the swirling core of this place.

It was a man or at least something that had a form similar to a man. His limbs seemed twisted and warped, but he had a head, two legs, and two hands. But the shadows at the edge of him meant that some portions of his body seemed to evaporate off of him into black mist, shrouding the whole of him in additional darkness.

Well, he had limbs that were close to arms. They seemed to twist and rupture before her very eyes. Vye blinked. It was hard to tell whether those changes were actually occurring, or if the strange evaporation that seized his body was simply warping her view...

He still was quite some distance away, so Vye took another step. And immediately she regretted it.

It wasn’t pain that hit her, but a desolate wave of loneliness that slithered into her chest and took up residence there. Poisonous feelers instantly spread out from that feeling in her chest, questing toward Vye’s secret fears and insecurities. Which honestly, weren’t hard to find. Immediately after it had aligned itself with those emotions already present in her chest, more negative emotions flowed outward in a sludge-like deluge.

The new feeling was a dim understanding that all effort was meaningless. Time inevitably slew all challengers. It was a vicious rage at the world that surrounded them and also the strange impulses of instinct that forced them to struggle. If nothing has meaning, why ingrain the existence of a fake meaning named ‘survival’ into their genetic code?

‘Why desire?’ The dark figure seemed to project out from his defeated stance. His limbs were still blurry, but Vye could now see the dark shadows surrounding his eyes and mouth. ‘Why exist? All will become nothing in the end. This pain… it was forced upon us. We don’t need to bear it. It is better to just-’

“Don’t try and stop me,” Vye hissed in the misty darkness. “You may have given up on your dream, but I have not. Nothing will stop me. One day… my dream… I’ll hold this entire world in the palm of my hand. And you… your fucked up world… I REJECT this.”

Pain roared upward from her hand like hungry flames through a forest on a dry summer day. But for a second, the sense of ominous pressure that filled the surrounding air parted. Her rejection roared in the air. The grey mist spun away from her. The veil of pressure parted even as the wind roared ever louder.

Vye was able to grit her teeth and take a step forward. And then another. But what awaited her after the second step was a shudder-inducing silence. Around her, the wind had died.

Very quickly, the details of that sitting figure resolved themselves. And just as Vye studied him, he moved.

In the silence, he shifted. His neck cracked. Vye abruptly realized that he had no true eyes or mouth, just deep pits of despair that dotted his face. That horrible creature looked up and their eyes met-

Vye gasped and sat up. Garret was crouching next to her with his familiar dour expression.

He pointed to the rope tied around her waist. “You were right, tying it from the beginning is much more efficient. And there isn’t any danger of just pulling someone’s shirt off, as happened with Valor…”

Which, at the time, had been rather fun to watch Valor be humiliated even further. But when people realized it would soon be their turn, they quickly developed counter-measures.

“Shit,” Vye sighed and leaned back against the ground. Then she brought her left hand to her chest and winced. Fiery daggers seemed to be ripping into the flesh of her forearm from the Ritual she left there. It seemed that she had activated it subconsciously while she was trying to approach one of Randidly’s image stones. And holy fuck, she wished she had not.

She studied the inflamed skin carefully, looking for any sort of deviation that could be causing the pain. This was much worse than it had been, even after the desperate gamble that had earned her the marred appendage. She didn’t find anything wrong with the limb or the Ritual, but… was it a bit larger than it had been previously…?

“I didn’t know you were talented with Engraving. But its probably still a bad idea to use it on your own body.” Garret said as he followed her gaze to her hand.

The corner of Vye’s mouth quirked up. “It’s not an Engraving… it's a Ritual.”

When Garrett just raised his eyebrows, Vye continued to explain, as though naming it would do something to stop the constant agony of her hand. “My parents weren’t very close to my grandma. I always wondered why… until I met the woman. Sally Ann Holladay. She was a little bit crazy. Worshipped a pantheon of strange gods I couldn’t find a history on no matter how I researched them and called herself the Priestess Primero.

“Probably because it made my parents mad… but I learned the weird Rituals that she practiced. And honestly… it wasn’t spiritual, but… calming. To have my grandma there, insisting that things be done just so. The details, the specific rules, the careful timing… I don’t know, I always felt better afterward. So I started performing the Rituals to help cope with stress. Then, after I woke up and the System was here, I was struggling to deal with the fact that the world effectively ended, and I got a Path for my troubles. A Path that made all of those Rituals my grandma made up become real.”