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Everything around the mountain is on fire. The world below is lit with dark flames.

Where am I?

He fears that he is back at the glade, looking into the soul prison within the obelisk. But this is something else, a landscape that is unknown to him, an undiscovered land. This place serves as a refuge for some lost and lonely mind.

Deep clouds cling to the air like grease on glass.

Something deep inside the mountain stirs. The stone under his feet groans and shifts. He hears a distant crack, like an enormous stone has fallen.

He runs.

It is not his body. She is tiny, whoever she is, short and light, and she is used to running, used to pushing herself beyond her limits. It is what she has always done.

The air is sluggish and thick. He moves as if through deep snow.

The light fades. Shadows spill across his vision like dark wine. Leaves crash and shatter on the ground like glass and stone.

Whoever’s mind he has intruded on is tearing itself apart.

Help.

He doesn’t know the voice. He feels that he should. He feels her words, and they cut across his ethereal skin like dull razors.

Help me. Please.

He stumbles up the mountain, moves deeper into a forest as it collapses into drifts of dry ash. The air swallows itself, becomes a cyclone that shines through the eye of an oily storm.

Everything turns hot. Mercurial wind scrapes through the bone trees. White dust falls from the sky.

A dissolving silhouette melts in the cold white eye of the liquid storm. It is a dark human outline that pulls apart like snow in water.

He reaches for the figure with a hand that isn’t his. The mountain shifts, and everything spins. Dismal breath washes over him. He silently plummets back down the mountain, into the heart of a raging cold inferno.

Cross wasn’t sure how he’d slept, or even if he’d slept. He stood against the wall, hurting everywhere. His knees felt like they’d been pelted with hammers. His back and shoulders ached with knots of tension, and his eyes were raw. His body was soaking wet. He shivered miserably, and sneezed.

He had no idea how long he’d been awake. He didn’t actually remember waking, just as he didn’t remember falling asleep.

Cross wandered through the ankle-deep waters of his oversized cell. His feet were sodden within his boots. His sinuses burned. The air felt toxic.

The oubliette was a nightmare of cobalt blue steel littered with dark detritus that floated in the air like clouds of heavy soot. The chains above his head rattled and clanged, forced by some breeze that wasn’t there.

Sometimes Cross imagined bodies up there in the darkness of the ceiling, lost in the jungle of chains. If there were corpses, they had to be as bored as he was.

He only barely felt his spirit, and her presence faded with each passing breath. They were killing her slowly. Her whispers were barely audible above the water and the chains.

What have they done to us?

Cross drifted. He felt like a shadow. Every time his consciousness started to fade he sloshed through the waters and tried to stay focused. He felt like he’d just woken up. H e had the dazed sensation of having just stepped into an unfamiliar room, over and over again. He had to remember what had just happened, had to re-establish some sense of place, of self. He felt like he was dreaming.

Maybe I am.

It was a nightmare of isolation, a dismal end to a dismal tale that would finish with him alone and in the dark, trapped in a metal coffin filled with water, shadows and chains.

His body was weary to the bone. He’d barely sat since he’d been brought to the prison. His legs had gone dull with pain. His muscles were so stiff it was a wonder he could move at all.

Cross couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He had moments when he couldn’t recall much of anything, and that frightened him, but fear, he decided, was good. It meant they hadn’t broken him yet.

He tried desperately to hold on to whatever thoughts he could, but it was difficult with his brain shifting in and out of focus. The world was a dark and noisy blur.

He thought of Snow and her dolls and her faceless boyfriend Geoff who he never actually got to meet; of Mom and Dad and his childhood, swings and plastic basketball hoops and bikes with training wheels; of the world turning black, The Black, shifting out of focus, the sky tearing open like a bloody and festering wound and raining blood and ash and spewing forth things that roamed the streets and ate people; he thought of days of sickness, floating in and out of consciousness, feverish and at the edge of death while nightmares lurked outside of his window; staring off into a hot darkness, a nightmare of eyes and teeth and the shadow of a cold and vast mountain; Drogan, an old mystic, a man from the mountains, who’d healed him, who’d explained to his wailing mother how her son was a warlock, a freak like the things that were destroying the world.

Cross remembered Razorwings and their vampire riders as they flew low through a red sky and searched for survivors, for refugees and lost children that they stole away and took back to the Ebon Cities’ feeding vats and skin factories.

He remembered the red-haired beauty he lost his virginity to, a whore whose name he couldn’t even remember but whose face and body he would never forget.

He remembered Samuel Graves, his best friend, so full of trouble and life and piss and grit, covered in mud and grime at his side in Blackmarsh, a prisoner of the very city Cross was lost in now, but Graves was dead, killed back in Rhaine in what felt like another lifetime now.

He recalled the study halls of Glaive and the cracked and listing monument on Ghostborne Island and the cold fields west of Thornn.

Cross recorded and catalogued his mind. He tried desperately to remember it all, to shelve away every ridiculous detail and fact about himself, to hold onto them, to place them somewhere and keep them there without having to even try. The memories blasted through his brain with staccato rhythm. It was difficult to keep up with them.

Soon, he lost track of everything but his mind.

He felt his spirit as she struggled. She stayed close, tied to him like a drowning swimmer in a pitch black sea. Cross couldn’t call on her for much more than fending off his pain, and even that strained her. He felt her whispers, so quiet they were like rustling leaves in a soft wind, completely out of place in the grime and stink and eye-numbing darkness.

Easy. Easy, I won’t let them hurt you.

It struck Cross as mildly insane that this was the first time since he’d acquired his new spirit that she wasn’t driving him crazy.

The light faded to a blur. It was hard to see even his own hand in front of his face.

Hours passed, or maybe days. There was no way to know.

Dark waters churned and chains rattled in ghostly echo. Cross stumbled in and out of awareness. He soon had no sense of where he was. He focused his mind and forced himself to remember things. Sometimes, he couldn’t do it.

He is trapped in an eternal midnight. Dry twigs are in his hair. He stands, shaking, and feels the bitter mountain air as it courses through the dead trees. Churning fires and distant howls fill the night with grim noise. His muscles are stiff. His feet crush twigs frozen in muddy ground as thick as tar.

He looks between the trees, and he sees a sliver of dead sky. Drifts of molten copper clouds lay smeared over the horizon like metallic stains.

The forest burns in the valley below. Cold smoke drifts up through iridescent rain and forms an ocean of cobalt cinders. Blades of dark ash, like smelted leaves, float dead in the air.

Behind him, the air twists into a funnel of translucent ice. Dirt and debris form a solid wall of choking haze. He sees a portal through the drifting fog, a pale passage that hangs there like a white scar.

I'm not here, he realizes.