Alarion leaned against the wall of Valentina's chamber, his limbs heavy as iron.

He'd slept for well over a day after his collapse. It had been a fitful slumber, full of nightmares that had been biding their time for days, and his status reflected as much. His Awakened body had replenished while he slept, but the most grievous aftereffects still lingered.

[Muscle Fatigue – Severe] – 30% maximum stamina for twenty-four hours. [Fracture (left wrist) – Minor] – 10% STR and AGI reduction for use of left arm. [Fracture (orbital bone) – Minor] – 10% AGI and PER reduction.

Even that was an improvement. The list had been three times as long when he'd awoken. Repeated castings of [Mend Body] had gotten the worst of it under control, but with his head clear, Alarion was keenly aware of just how fine a line he'd walked.

It was little wonder that Sierra had been horrified at the sight of him. Or that she was trying to talk him down.

"You can not seriously be considering this," Sierra said, her voice tight with frustration. "Look at you. You can barely stand."

Alarion managed a weak smile. "But I am standing."

"You are using the wall as a crutch," she shot back without hesitation. "Do I need to push you over to make my point?"

Valentina cleared her throat as Sierra approached Alarion, stopping the girl in her tracks.

"He is going to get himself killed," the Vitrian girl protested. "And you are going to enable this?!"

"And if he does, that is his right," Valentina responded calmly. "He still has a few minutes to gather his strength and decide."

Sierra's fists clenched as she locked eyes with the once god. Twice, her lips parted as though about to speak, but they closed just as often, her only outburst being an annoyed breath through her nose.

Alarion could empathize. He'd reacted similarly when Valentina had woken him with ill tidings. His two days of rest were almost up. He either entered the final challenge or forfeited.

"You nearly died," Sierra said, her voice tinged with anger and something else besides. "Do you understand that? The shape you were in? I have seen actual corpses in better condition."

"Nearly," Alarion countered unconvincingly, wincing as he shifted his weight. "But I did not."

Sierra stepped closer, her ice-blue eyes narrowed. "You have already gotten what you needed. A passable class, new spells, you turned that ridiculous mace into a casting implement. What more could you gain that's worth risking your life for?"

When Alarion didn't answer, Sierra threw her hands up.

"You stubborn piece of…" The girl bit down on what she wanted to say, took a breath, and tried a different tactic. "What do you think happens to me if the only thing I leave with is your body?"

"That is not up to me," Alarion said at last, "this is."

Sierra looked ready to bite his head off, but whatever she had to say died in her throat. There was something about his expression. The hurt was still there, the physical and mental toll the challenges had taken on the young man. But a look of determination joined it. More than single-minded stubbornness, it was a look of pure resolve.

"I am doing this," he whispered before he looked at Valentina, "I am ready."

Sierra opened her mouth to speak, but was gone with a snap of Valentina's fingers. Yet despite Sierra's allegations that she was enabling Alarion, the goddess seemed almost as perturbed as Sierra had been by his decision. "You are sure?"

"Mm," Alarion answered. He looked introspective and vulnerable as he continued, "I have had few choices in my life. This I can choose."

Valentina nodded reluctantly. "And I can not stop you, even if I wanted to. Good hunting."

Then she stepped forward, wrapping the young man in a hug.

"Win or lose, we are not likely to meet again." She said, arms still tight around his shoulders. "I… was glad to have you here. Even if only for a time. I will miss you."

Alarion felt a lump in his throat, and after a moment's hesitation, he returned the embrace.

"Hmm? Oh. You're right!" Valentina cast her incongruous words upward and held Alarion's gaze as she leaned back at arm's reach. "If you… when you finish, you'll be taken out of the dungeon. If you want to go elsewhere, now is-"

Alarion shook his head.

"You're sure?" Valentina's voice sounded more skeptical than when she'd been when he told her he wanted to try the final challenge.

"Elena saved my life," Alarion answered. "ZEKE gave me strength. Sierra fought by my side. Even Dar… I have an obligation to them. To all of them."

"You-" Valentina seemed intent on rebutting his arguments, but it was clear it wouldn't work. "You have a good heart, Alarion. Don't let it get you into trouble."

Alarion flashed her a wan smile, hefted his mace with a grunt, and entered the last challenge.

Alarion staggered the instant he was through the doorway, the mace suddenly heavy in his grip. No, that wasn't right.

His arm was too heavy.

His knees buckled instantly, sending him crashing to the stone floor. The surrounding air was thick, pressing against his skin, his eyes, his lungs. It took everything he could to force his chest to rise and fall, but even then, the oxygen he took in was itself too heavy for his body to process.

It was full of mana. Raw, unfiltered power saturated his surroundings. It pushed into him, through him, entering every broken mana circuit, but unable to leave as the outside pressure continued to increase.

"What—" he gasped, but couldn't finish the thought. His lungs burned with each breath, the air so dense with mana that it felt like drowning. For all the talk of his wounds, they were irrelevant. He couldn't have endured this even at peak condition.

It was a familiar experience. His inability to channel mana externally had rendered him insensitive to most high mana environments. But this... this was different. This was like the weight of divinity pressing down on him, as though Valentina had loosened her shackles and let him have it. The magic invaded every pore, slipping between his cells, threading through his veins. His body trembled as the power threatened to tear him apart from within. It felt like being filled with molten metal.

Alarion tried to push himself up, but his arms gave out. The mace clattered beside him as he collapsed fully to the ground. His vision blurred, darkness creeping in at the edges.

"Solar… Burst." Alarion incanted desperately. A wave of heat and power pulsed from his body, but the ambient energy topped him off in seconds. He needed something consistent. "Mend Body!"

This time, there was at least some relief. Mana flowed freely from his MP pool, and he gasped in a desperate breath. But it didn't last. The oppressive weight returned, his MP stabilizing, then beginning to tick up one point at a time, squeezing his airways as it filled him beyond capacity.

He needed more. He needed his mace.

It hadn't fallen far away, less than a foot in fact, but with an ocean of mana bearing down on him, that distance felt almost insurmountable. He tried to summon it, willing the magical wrappings to pull the weapon back toward him, but the mana-rich air interfered with the ability.

He'd have to get it himself.

Alarion couldn't stand, he couldn't crawl, but with great effort, he inched along the ground, dragging himself across the minuscule distance until at last he touched a finger to the side of his implement.

"Solar Burst." The weight lifted from his body just long enough for Alarion to grab the hilt of his weapon. "Empowered Solar Burst!"

The second spell brought genuine relief as it drained the majority of his MP in a single cast, along with a sizable portion of his HP, courtesy of his latest reward:

Lesser Vestal Stone of Empowerment [Rare](Rank I)

Description: A clear blue Vestal Stone with milky white imperfections throughout.

Requirements: None

Attunement Cost: 20

Type: Vestal Stone

Enchantment: Provides three daily uses of the metamagic enhancement skill: Empower Magic.

Ability Bonuses: INT +10.

—

Empower Magic [Exceptional]

Description: An extension of the basic trade-off system present in most spellcraft skills, Empower Magic drastically increases the effectiveness of their spells at the cost of their mana efficiency and casting time.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Requirements: Lesser Vestal Stone of Empowerment must be slotted into an appropriate held item.

Type: Active

Effects: Triple the effects of any spell cast, including range, radius, damage, healing, and duration. Quadruple the cost of any spell cast. Double any casting time.

Growths: N/A

"Empowered Solar Burst! Empowered Mend Body!" Alarion shouted his incantations as he felt his spell-casting beat back an eternity of energy. A wave of relief washed over him as he took in a full breath, then another, the new mana burning away almost as quickly as it entered him under the normally ruinous cost of an [Empowered Mend Body].

Almost.

A look at his MP pool showed the truth. The increase was slow, a handful of seconds between each point, but it was enough. He had perhaps half an hour before his MP reached its cap and his body overflowed once more, even with [Empowered Mend Body] running non-stop.

Not that he could keep it running indefinitely. His wrist was already back to a fit shape, and the broken bone around his eye would not be far behind. Past a certain point, over-healing by that amount would be as damaging to his body as letting the mana flood in directly. He could continue to cast [Solar Burst] to offset it, but that would only be a stopgap.

He had minutes to find a solution.

Alarion finally pushed himself upright, leaning heavily on his mace. His vision, blurry at first, cleared as he took in his surroundings.

"What..." The word died in his throat at what he saw.

He stood on a crescent-shaped platform of pure white marble, its surface polished to a glimmering sheen. Nothing connected the platform to his origin; it floated in an infinite sea of stars. Countless points of light swirled in cosmic patterns that hurt his eyes to follow.

Alarion had not seen the night sky like this in years. In the Old City, the stars had been dim specks hidden by the light of Ashad Vitri, and on the Trinity Isles, he'd always been too busy to look up. It was a sight as intimidating as it was nostalgic.

But the stars weren't what made his breath catch.

Before him, towering impossibly large, floated what could only be described as a severed head—though nothing human had ever looked like this. It dwarfed anything that he had seen, anything that could exist. Even the spire he'd seen so many weeks ago looked minuscule by comparison. It made Alarion feel like his little marble island was just another star among the multitude.

Something had separated the thing from its body, leaving only ragged edges where the neck should have been. Seven eyes were scattered across its surface, each the size of mountains. Or planets. It was hard to get any sense of scale from the thing. Indeed, trying to apply any frame of reference felt… wrong, as though he were using the wrong tool for the task by invoking comparison.

No discernible pattern existed in the arrangement of the eyes; some clustered together, others were isolated, and their location had an unsettling habit of shifting when he wasn't looking. Each eye was a different color, pulsing with internal light as they rotated independently, scanning the surrounding cosmos.

Below the eyes, seven mouths gaped open in various expressions. Some appeared to be screaming, others frozen mid-thought, while another was endlessly cackling. Teeth with impossible angles lined each maw, and occasionally, one mouth would snap shut, vanishing into the greater whole while another opened elsewhere.

Gray skin, if it could be called such a thing, shifted between states—sometimes appearing solid, sometimes liquid, occasionally seeming to evaporate into mist before reforming.

Alarion's knees threatened to buckle again, but not from the pressure of the mana.

"Lal Viren?" Alarion asked, for such a thing could only be a God.

Seven eyes snapped toward Alarion in unison. The weight of the surrounding mana doubled, then doubled again. He collapsed and nearly fainted, but the pressure eased as quickly as it had come. When he looked up, the god lost interest, its eyes surveying reality again.

Alarion knew what he needed to do. It wasn't some grand deduction, but a revelation—a primal, inherent understanding.

It had to see him. Not look in his direction, but really see him.

And he had to endure that sight.

Alarion's body trembled as he pushed himself onto his knees. The platform beneath him felt pleasantly cool, grounding him amidst the cosmic chaos through a hint of normalcy.

He closed his eyes, forcing his breath to slow despite the air's heaviness. His mind focused inward, calling upon his training.

The [Kel-Taran Meditation] was first. In the previous challenge, he had focused on it for its healing effects, and now he relied on it to center his mind. Next, he activated his [Introverted Mana Sense], careful to keep his sixth sense away from the divine.

The world around him faded as he directed his attention to the mana within.

His body was a tangle of strings—thin, delicate threads of energy weaving through every part of his being, each twisted up amidst a hundred others that gave no care to the intricate pathways inside him. The knots and snags had created blocks within his body, which had allowed pressure to build.

The solution was simple: unravel the mess.

To do so seemed impossible.

There were too many snarls, too many issues. By the time he finished untangling the knot at the core of one junction, another had formed elsewhere, while two more had grown in size. Even the area he'd fixed was already showing signs of damage mere moments after he'd finished his task.

Spot fixes would not solve the problem. His solution had to be holistic.

Alarion withdrew, focusing on the broader picture. For a time, he studied the trouble spots, trying to determine how the outside pressure had done its damage. But his real breakthrough came when he looked at healthy areas.

Those few healthy areas looked no different in principle. Foreign mana flooded them, and they should have overloaded like the rest of his system. But as he studied one after another, he started to understand. They'd become twisted up like all the others, but they'd done so on single 'strands' from the outside.

What he'd thought was one mass of near-infinite mana was, in fact, seven. Seven different, yet almost identical, sources collided with one another inside his body. It was no wonder it had nearly killed him.

With the diagnosis in hand, the only step that remained was treatment—a delicate task, but also one he would have to complete quickly.

Alarion ended his [Empowered Mend Body] with a mental command and felt the sudden weight of divinity on his shoulders. The abrupt change in pressure threatened to steal the air from his lungs, but there was nothing for it. He needed to purge his existing mana for his solution to work, and he couldn't do that and maintain his channeling simultaneously.

"Solar Burst," Alarion said calmly. Then he repeated the spell. And again. Each cast chipped away at his HP as it burned the foreign mana from his body, new mana rushing in to fill the gaps. He had to direct it, using the same pinning technique he'd learned from the dreaded chair to trap each of the disparate brands of mana to a different part of his body, like separate lines on a loom.

It was strenuous work only possible through repeated [Solar Bursts] and the purging effect of [Kel-Taran Meditation], but the results spoke for themselves as the pressure on Alarion's lungs relaxed. There was a little trial and error, and a near miss as one channel touched up against another, but within minutes, Alarion had isolated the seven different flows from one another. Without competing mana to crash against, the seven moved through his body as effortlessly as any ambient mana, filling his MP pool to the brim without threatening to overload it.

The question was, could his work endure scrutiny? The lines in his body were tenuous. If they broke under pressure, the whole thing would cascade in moments. He might not get another shot.

Alarion took a deep breath and disengaged his skills. He stood and looked up at the god.

"Lal Viren?" he asked again.

Seven mountainous eyes swiveled down, their focus crashing into Alarion like an ocean. The weight of that gaze sent ripples of pressure through his carefully curated loom. Snarls formed instantly in the delicate structure he'd built within himself, hairline fractures spreading through his magical defenses.

The mana surged, no longer seven distinct flows but a chaotic maelstrom. It battered at his mana circuits, threatening to tear him apart from within. He staggered to a knee as pain lanced through his flesh, his bones, his very being.

Then he stood.

"Lal Viren," Alarion gasped again, forcing the name through gritted teeth.

The pressure intensified. His ears popped, and something warm trickled down his nose. Blood. He could taste it on his lips now, metallic and sharp. The carefully constructed pathways within him were collapsing, and he could do nothing to repair them, not in his condition.

But his eyes didn't waver on the eldritch thing above him.

Alarion planted his feet more firmly on the marble platform, using his mace as an anchor, as the mana emanating from seven eyes struck him like a physical wind. He let it pass into him, through him. Something inside broke, and he felt the weight bearing down on him, choking him. It wouldn't be long now.

"Lal Viren!" he called a third time, louder now, his voice steadier despite the blood dripping from his nose, ears, and eyes.

Then, all at once, it stopped.

Yours is the kind to find the secret of the secret of the kind that has known the secret.

You have a good heart.

I wish to see it.

The words came out as gibbering, discordant whispers with the strength of a hurricane. One mouth spoke them, another repeated, and two others echoed before the first even began.

Lal Viren screamed as if struck, crying out with all seven mouths, then spoke as one.

Alarion Regethern-Feln.

Two-Thirty Eight.

Orphan.

I call you Challenger. I call you Victor.

I call you Fool and Slave and Harbinger and Savior!

I call you Uncle and Father!

I call you Murderer!

The words were a dizzying assault on the senses, for they were seen as much as heard. He saw flashes with each title. Disjointed images. He saw himself standing with Valentina, then facing Lal Viren. He saw an old man, a beautiful woman, a man bound to a chair, and a dead body. He saw violet eyes so like his own, then Vitrian ice blue, then the faces of his victims, of the Butcher, of Val, of his father, and Aina.

All begat Three. Three begat Four. Four begat All. Some became None. None maimed Four. One is Taken. Another soon to follow. None will be All.

You fight an unwinnable battle. You fight an impossible foe.

You stand against It Who Was All and It Who Was Not All and It Who Was Nothing!

You shirk against the Order and the Forgotten and the Final.

Why?

The words meant nothing to Alarion, but that question meant everything to the god who glared at him with seven frowns. Whatever it was, this moment, it was important. It needed an answer, one that came to mind wholly unbidden, the words unfamiliar on his tongue.

"Because I won't take your orders."

The god shrieked, a world-piercing noise that went on for an instant or an eternity. Its eyes rolled back into its head, its titanic mass shifted backward as if in thought. Then it spoke once more, the words growled out like an angry animal.

Thrice Betrayed.

Blue and Violet and Empty.

Thrice Fallen.

Lioric and Seric and Feln.

Thrice Shackled.

Ordered and Forgotten and Final.

Thrice Asked.

Stone and Sky and Home.

Thrice Invaded.

Friend and Stranger and Family.

Thrice Ended.

Heart and Soul and Mind and God.

We are ended, Orphan. I would be rid of you now.

"But-"

A hard yank pulled Alarion away from the god and sent him hurtling back through reality. A kaleidoscope of sound and color blossomed in front of him, then snapped off in an instant.

He hit the ground with a thud, nearly cracking his head open on a rock as he skidded to a stop in the mouth of the small cave. Sierra sat just ahead of him, a book open on her lap, a look of surprise on her face.

"You made it," she said, her tone neutral. Her expression was cheerful, but her eyes were sad. "Was it worth it?"

Alarion thought back to the strange encounter, then frowned. He remembered the god and its cryptic words clear as day, but not its shape or its dimensions—only the vague outline of the thing. Stranger still, he remembered his rewards and the lessons he'd learned. But little else. He remembered eating and drinking. He remembered talking to… someone, even some of their answers. But he couldn't put a name or face to the fragmented memories.

"I…" Alarion couldn't shake the feeling of confusion. Of loss.

An urgent notification blinked in the corner of his vision.

New Class Choices Available!

"I think so."

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