The Wanderer stood over the trembling man, hands dripping red.
The one-eyed leader scrambled backward on his elbows, his boots kicking up dirt in a frantic, pathetic movement. "No, no... please," he wheezed. "I only came because I knew your face. I thought you were just a beggar!"
The Wanderer reached down and grabbed him up by the collar, bringing their faces inches apart. The magic still simmering in the Wanderer's gaze made the man’s single eye track wildly in terror.
"I’ll let you live," the Wanderer rasped, "as payment for the eye I took.”
Go back to Rohan. Tell him all my debts in Lythra are settled.
My ties to that temple are cut." He tightened his grip for a second, his voice dropping. "But if he feels like sending more pigs my way to be slaughtered... he is more than welcome."
He shoved the man away. He scrambled to his feet and bolted toward the city gates, his terrified whimpers fading into the trees.
The Wanderer watched him go, then turned his back on Lythra. He left the cloth bag of coins and bread sitting in the dirt.
As he moved deeper into the woods, his steps became a heavy, uneven stumble. The cuts across his chest and limbs refused to knit, weeping blood that stained his new robes, but the hunger inside was far more agonizing.
It wasn't satisfied. The two assassins had been a mere snack for the void in his marrow.
He felt a twisted, growing strength with every drop of blood, as if his own pain was the catalyst for something greater.
Hallucinations began to bleed into his reality, the long fight with the assassins awoke a fragment of his lost memories.
The trees distorted into a blur of faces, and the whispering wind carried voices that shouldn't exist.
His body shook, the scene in front of his eyes dissolved into a different world, surrounded by entities he didn't recognize.
Yet he was sure they wanted him gone…and he wanted their demise.
Above him stretched a dark sky with a sun-sized artifact at the center, blue energy swirling within, it felt familiar like a part of him.
He tried to move but he wasn't in control.
As if he was watching through the eyes of someone else.
The ground beneath him dissolved into liquid shadow. Sooty, spectral hands emerged from the muck, dragging him down into a tunnel of suffocating smoke. All around him, massive, unblinking red eyeballs stared from the darkness, their gaze piercing through his skin to his very soul.
The tunnel spat him out into a pocket dimension, void of shifting gray and absolute silence.
“Welcome,” a figure whispered directly into his ear.
The Wanderer spun, slashing at the air behind him, but he hit nothing but cold mist, an echo of mocking laughter fading away.
“Let’s play a little,” the voice echoed, vibrating from every direction at once.
“Your tricks won't work!” the Wanderer shouted, though his voice sounded small and hollow in the vast emptiness.
Chains made of solidified smoke erupted from the floor, snaring his limbs. From the darkness above, shadow clones surged downward in a rain of steel.
Daggers stripped the armor of his shoulders in thin ribbons, but the Wanderer closed his eyes, enduring the brun the blades left.
He reached deep into the core of his own fabrication, a spiral raging within.
He let it detonate.
A white-blue wave of raw energy exploded outward, vaporizing the smoke chains and shattering the illusions like glass. In that split second of blinding clarity, he saw the real figure flinch.
The Wanderer lunged. His hand closed around the shadow-man's throat, pinning him. He drove his runic heavy sword through the figure's chest.
The figure vomited oily smoke. He tried to dissolve, to fade into the mist, but the Wanderer’s hand glowed with a disruptive energy that locked the shadow-man in place.
He twisted the figure downward, and drove him head first into the abyss below, pouring raw Spiral energy into the connection.
The pocket dimension couldn't contain the surge, it cracked and splintered. They both tumbled through the fracture, dumped back onto the world beneath the artifact.
In a heap of broken limbs the shadow-man was cannibalized by his own shadows.
The world around him flickered again, distorted back to the woods.
His vision blurred back to the trees surrounding, coughing up black bile, his body a map of fresh agony.
He touched his chest, sensing the now familiar hunger within, and said in gasps “ so…you are the Spiral.”
He continued,
“ What does this make me?”
His back hit the bark of the tree, his lungs burning. He stared at his trembling hands.
*What was that place? Who am I?* The questions filled his mind. The Spiral was a ghost inside him, reshaping his body.
But offered no answers, only cold hunger.
A sudden rustle nearby snapped his head around. His eyes locked onto a patch of brush far away. A wild rabbit bolted, its tiny heart a frantic drumbeat that he could practically feel in his own chest.
Everything was too much. The world had turned into a sensory assault.
He could pinpoint the precise weight of birds shifting in their nests high above, he could hear the crickets hidden in the roots.
The vividness was agonizing. Every cut on his skin screamed with a heightened pain, pulsing in harmony with the raging energy within.
Paranoia settled into his bones. Every twitch of a leaf was the start of a strike. Every groan of a branch was a hidden assassin’s footstep. He was a weapon with a hair-trigger, ready for a hunt that hadn't ended.
He began to move, his pace quickening from a walk to a desperate run. He lunged through the forest, his eyes darting wildly.
The forest remained indifferent, peaceful, and silent, which only made the screaming in his head louder.
"Show yourself!" he roared into the canopy, his voice cracking the stillness.
He spun in a circle, his fists clenched, magic sparking erratically off his knuckles. "Cowards! I know you’re there! Stop hiding in the shadows!"
He struck out at a hanging vine, severing it with a burst of magic, but the only thing that answered him was the mocking echo of his own voice and the distant, startled flight of a murder of crows.
He was alone, a king of a phantom battlefield, fighting enemies that had already retreated into the corners of his mind.
He took a damp cave as a shelter, sleeping unseen within its darkness.
The days had dissolved into a fever of survival.
His refined palate for the temple’s clean grain was gone, replaced by the blood taste of raw meat and the crunch of insects. He was becoming a creature of the undergrowth, his skin covered in dark patches that stung every time he used magic.
The snap of a dry twig sounded like a thunderclap to his hyper-tuned ears. He dropped the half-eaten carcass of a squirrel and vanished into the canopy.
From the safety of the leaves, he watched the caravan. Five men. Three guards in clanging steel, two merchants in travel-worn robes.
His mind automatically overlaid tactical grids onto the scene, marking their heights, their weapons, and the count of their breath.
He moved through the branches like a ghost, then rained down crude spears he carved to hunt, now used to distract them.
"Ambush!" a guard roared, his visor snapping down. "Protect the merchants!"
While the guards formed a defensive shell, the Wanderer dropped behind the carriage.
He pulled back the heavy sheet of cloth, his eyes widening at the gleam of cold iron. He reached into the pile and pulled out a sword, balanced and keen.
He threw a stone into the brush on the opposite side, as the guards' heads whipped toward the sound, he lunged.
He slammed the hilt of his new blade into the back of a guard’s helmet. The clang of steel against the skull echoed through the trees as the man hit the dirt.
He jumped behind a merchant, the cold edge of the sword pressed against the man's throat.
"Who sent you?" he snarled, his eyes bloodshot and twitching. "Rohan’s pigs? Or did you crawl out of the Spiral to finish me?"
The merchant trembled, his hands raised. "Spiral? I... I don't know what you’re talking about!"
"One more step and the weakling dies!" He barked at the remaining guards. "Tell me who you are!"
"Calm down," the other merchant said, stepping forward with his palms open. "We have gold if that’s what you seek. But I assure you, we are just traders heading to Draemir. We have no problem with you."
The Wanderer’s gaze darted from the merchant to the trees, then to the shadows, unable to distinguish the rustle of leaves from the whispers in his mind. The merchant gestured to the guards, who reluctantly lowered their weapons. "See? No harm. Just calm down."
The Wanderer began to lower the blade, the tension in his arm slightly released,until the downed guard groaned, lunging upward from the dirt in a desperate tackle.
His instincts took over, shoving the merchant into the path of the guard, sending them tumbling into a heap of tangled limbs. Before the others could react, he vaulted into the air, catching a low-hanging branch and vanishing back into the emerald dark of the forest.
"We truly didn't mean to disturb you!" the merchant shouted toward the trees, his voice wavering. "Keep the sword! We’ll even give you a warm meal as an apology if you come down!"
The Wanderer crouched on a branch high above, his chest heaving, his fingers clutched around the grip of the stolen steel. He watched them with unblinking intensity.
"Alright," the merchant sighed, dusting off his robes. "I think he’s gone. Let’s move before something else finds us."
The caravan creaked back into motion, the slow roll of the wheels hitting the paved path.
The Wanderer waited until they were far enough, then he began to move, following them through the shadows.