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| Timestamp: 89th of Spring, 511 AV Location: The Unforgiving Ulric trudged up the ridge of thorns and shifting slate, cursing under his breath. He was never going to escape this labyrinth of jagged rock. He would be trapped forever, denied his vengeance. Resting his crossbow on the ground, he paused for a minute, wiping his sweaty brow with the back of his head. He couldn’t see any eagles in the sky. Well, at least there’s that, he scowled, fumbling for his watersk- Location: The depths of Ulric’s mind Ulric had chosen this place for a reason. The vast, underground cavern, with its crumbling dome and the half-buried ruins of an alien city, had a poetic feeling about it. He had always disdained refinement, whether it was partaking of delicate carafes of wine, dancing to the strains of a lute, or reading musty tomes. That was not his life. He had grown up on the canals, amid piles of floating filth, longing not for wealth, but for a chance to bring down the patricians. That was what this mindscape presented. A city of art and culture, destroyed and forgotten. The streets were strewn with debris; piles of rubble, bones, broken statuary, shards of pottery. There were twisted, broken weapons and fragments of armor, pitted with rust. There had been a battle here. A fire as well. This was a city of the dead, its walls glowing faintly with the creep of phosphorescent mold, rooms swarming with souls. This would be the setting for their final confrontation. He sat quietly on a dusty mosaic, so that when Ulric’s eyes snapped, Ulric was waiting for him. “Good afternoon,” Ulric said with a faint smile, savoring the look of panic that flashed in Ulric’s eyes. “What is this?” Ulric was oblivious to the setting. He was staring at his hands, desperate, panicked rage manifesting on his face. The face of a child. “Why have you brought us here?” “This time has come for you to leave.” Ulric remarked idly, though he was quaking visibly. The child before him – twisted, and immensely powerful – desired nothing more than his complete destruction and the subsequent merging of their fragmented minds. “And if I won’t?” “We finish what began in the basement.” “Then you are a fool.” The child began to laugh, its eyes luminous in the gloom, face twisted into a snarl. He was not innocent. He was hatred incarnate, a being with a sundered mind, yet behind his mask there was the piercing agony of a child who desperately sought to rearrange the pieces. He wanted to be whole again, but his efforts met only with futility. And from this came blind rage. “You have no power here,” hissed the child. “I defeated you once. I will do it again, and this time there will be no whispering in the shadows, no more pitiful efforts to subvert the vengeance we have ordained. I am strong, but you – you are weak, undeserving of these muscles, these bones, this rippling coat of flesh. We are a great warrior, but you would have us waste what we have created by grappling with slimy fish, by denying the inevitability of our reign. We are a god. We were meant to rule the world together.” “Don’t try to sway me with your pathetic delusions of grandeur,” Ulric snorted. “For this entire season I’ve heard you speak of us, of how we are feeling and what we are supposed to do, but can’t you understand? You don’t speak for me. You borrow my memories. You play the strings of my mind as a harp, yet we have never been truly united. You are a usurper. You have languished too long in the abyss of your madness to comprehend the world around you, to envision that you could ever be worshiped.” “And why would they not worship us? We are meant to cleanse this world of perfidy and putrefaction. We are the reaper,” spat the child, leveling a twisted finger at its counterpart. “Just listen to yourself,” said Ulric, his voice thick with contempt. “What do you have that is not mine? These hands are mine. These reflexes are mine. There is nothing of you except hatred." “Hatred is what the world deserves. Hatred is what makes us strong.” “And for that I pity you, for what would you be without hatred? A forlorn, grieving child, overcome by the torments that have been inflicted upon him.” “We have had enough of your poison words,” sneered the child. “Pity is for the weak.” “I am not weak.” “Not weak? The child chuckled menacingly. “Did you not feel me asserting my supremacy? I eroded your barriers one tiny grain at a time, until the breach grew wide enough for my hatred to surge through. I destroyed your capacity for empathy. I pilfered fragments of your memory and with them, I skewed your perception of reality. I bound you with chains of my own making. I banished you to the same prison that confined me for all these years, and even though you have broken free, your power is nothing to mine.” “You aren’t considering the entire range of possibilities.” Ulric looked vaguely amused, yet his heart was gripped by icy tendrils of fear. “You are dominant, but perhaps I conceded to your ascendancy. It was inevitable, was it not? And I do not fight losing battles. No, perhaps I planned this encounter from the beginning, when I first realized what you were and what you sought to set in motion. You think you know everything, but only because you simplify the world as a child would. You don’t know anything. You have raw power, but what is it without intellect?” “Don’t try to be cunning.” Before Ulric realized what was happening, the scrawny child was blurring through the air, claws erupting from its hands. He managed to catch its arm, throwing it over a hundred yards across the dome, into a crumbling temple. A cloud of dust and stone fragments erupted from the ruins, and then the child emerged, unscathed. Here, in a corner of this mind they had struggled so bitterly over, there were no constraints to the havoc they could wreak. The dome rumbled, threatening collapse. A few slabs of stone plunged onto the newly vacated mosaic, shattering its dirty ceramic tiles. Ulric leapt over the debris, gesturing at the shards which he sent whistling across the dome. The child responded by tearing a metal door off its hinges and using it as a shield. Suddenly, a row of buildings exploded behind Ulric, showering him with chunks of plaster. He dove behind another building, only to feel the swipe of claws across his face. A scream erupted from his lips. He tried to knock the child back, but it swept his legs out from beneath him, eyes glowing purple in the gloom. It was stronger than he could ever have imagined. Its mouth opened in a sneer, revealing a pair of fangs. With a strangled cry, Ulric kicked it in the chest and rolled aside, trying to flee. He had underestimated the child, and now it was going to finish him for good. The claws pierced his arm, rending through muscle and bone, then ripping his entire limb away in a spray of blood. More screaming. More blood. The claws began to shred his back. With a strength born of desperation, Ulric seized a rock and smashed it against the child’s head, pitching it through a door that splintered upon impact. Then he began to run, his legs blurring as he ducked into a warren of tunnels, willing gaped wound in his shoulder to close. Slowly, the spurts of blood lessened and the flesh began to knit. “Going somewhere?” The child was back. Ulric spun around, tusks sprouting from his mouth, just in time to be lifted off his feet by another explosion. He responded in kind, trying to collapse the tunnel behind him, wreathing the child in a deadly shrapnel of stone fragments. But its progress was inexorable. He couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t hurt it. The child raised its hand and broken weapons lifted from the debris, hovering in midair. “Perhaps it’s you that doesn’t comprehend.” |
