Bari walked through the crimson labyrinth, every step swallowed by the whisper of black sand beneath his boots. The corals twisted upward in impossible spirals, forming walls and arches that seemed to stretch on without end. Shadows pooled in their hollows, alive with movement. Nightmare creatures lurked everywhere — some slithering across the reef, others burrowing deep, waiting for prey to stumble too close.
He saw them all. His Aspect painted their positions in clear detail, yet knowledge did not make the path easier. Ahead, two choices beckoned.
To the north, beyond seventy kilometres of hostile terrain, stood the Dark City. Its silhouette flickered with faint lights, a hive of activity pulsing even at this distance. Safety — or at least the closest thing to it in the Dream Realm.
The other path led west to something far closer and less welcoming. A tower that rose from the sea like a bloodied blade thrust into the heavens. From twenty kilometres away it looked forged, not grown, its sheer sides streaming with rivulets of crimson coral that spread outward like the veins of some dying god. The Spire stood alone upon an island, surrounded on all sides by stagnant black water.
Even from here Bari could tell its walls were too perfect, too deliberate, as though human hands had once shaped them. Frozen waterfalls of coral cascaded down its inner walls, catching what little light bled from the grey sky, while its upper levels vanished into shadow. Galleries of stone jutted from its sides, and thick coral columns spiralled upward like stairs carved for giants.
At the Spire's heart lay a well. Its surface gleamed like a mirror of pure night, utterly still, as though it had never once known the ripple of wind. The sight of it pried at his nerves. It was wrong — not merely deep, but endless, as if the world itself had been hollowed to make room for it.
Every instinct screamed to keep away. But then he saw it…
The gateway.
A vast balcony had been carved into the tower's side, littered with broken marble pillars, their ruins entwined with streaks of crimson coral. At its centre lay a stone dais, within it an iron ring encircled by shimmering runes. The corals recoiled from that place, leaving the stone clean, as though unwilling to touch what it contained.
Bari's pulse quickened. That ring wasn't decoration. It was a gateway — the very threshold out of the Dream Realm, to awakening.
But hope died just as quickly.
The Spire was surrounded and swarmed by nightmare creatures. Hundreds circled around it, grotesque forms spawned of coral and others of flesh and bone. Inside, the numbers thinned, but what remained was worse. Golems, carved of crimson reef and half-shaped like men, towered in ranks across the lower floors. Higher still, they gave way to something far more terrible.
A Terror.
Not a metaphor — a true Fallen Terror, his eyes showcasing its rank above its head in blazing runes. It slouched like a broken idol at the gateway's side, its colossal frame woven of coral and mutilated flesh. Human faces bulged from its body in the hundreds, each one frozen in silent agony, mouths wide as though caught mid-scream. Their hollow eyes stared outward, wells of endless black.
And yet… the creature was not the strangest thing.
Coral clung to its body like leeches, pumping rivers of essence into its flesh. From a distance, it looked like a beacon of searing light — countless threads of essence snaking through the labyrinth, draining from every beast that died within reach of the corals.
His gaze pierced a wall and watched as two nightmare creatures battled far across the horizon. The victor slew the other, then staggered and fell due to its terrible wounds. On the outside, nothing seemed to happen, but for someone who could see essence, it was an intriguing sight. The essence that the nightmare creature had used to enhance its body was sapped away by the coral, while the other nightmare creature did not seem to share the same fate as it bled to its death.
He pondered what was the difference between the two — why did one's energy get sapped upon its death and the other did not? His eyes whispered the truth: Coral. That's when he noticed that one of the creatures was sprawled in the black sand while the other died on the coral.
As he pondered this, he watched as the trickle of essence travelled from coral to coral, going underground to its roots before coming back up and moving through the corals as if it were a passage. It coursed through hidden channels until it reached the Spire. By the time it reached the Terror, little remained. Its journey seemed inefficient, wasting large amounts of essence. A trickle, no more than a shard's worth, was all that remained by the time the essence reached the Terror.
But trickles gathered into rivers, and rivers into floods.
The coral network stretched for leagues, horizon to horizon. The surface was just the visible coral; underground, it stretched like an ocean of roots originating and feeding the monster.
And feeding something more.
At the tower's peak, a pale sun burned. It drank the overflow of essence, its radiance spilling out across the wasteland of coral. The light scoured everything it touched, leaving the landscape awash in sickly brilliance.
Bari clenched his jaw. No sane person would choose the Spire. Not when the Dark City lay within reach. Dangerous, yes — its streets writhed with devils and fallen creatures — but nothing compared to the abomination that guarded the gateway.
And yet, his eyes lingered on the black well.
Its surface was smooth, unbroken, sealed by an invisible lattice of runes. He traced them, recognising the touch of runic sorcery. The well did not spill over because it could not — it was bound, held back from flooding the world above.
Through the depths of the seal, his vision plunged farther. What he saw made his stomach twist.
The well was not merely deep. It descended for hundreds of kilometres, straight through the earth, then branched into a cavern so vast it made mountains seem small. That chasm was hollow, filled to the brim with a black sea.
That, however, was not the only entrance. The second seemed to be nearly a hundred kilometres away, passing by the Dark City. The cave stretched for hundreds of kilometres in all directions, going under him and reaching a crater that his vision could not see the end of due to the strain of such distance. The best he could see was half of its length. It looked like some giant had crashed into the ground and caused a crater that nearly ruptured the earth.
Near the centre of the crater, the ground turned black like glass, and at its heart was a round hole that led into the earth's depths. This hole stretched into a colossal chamber that contained the Dark Sea. Luckily, as he observed, the sea did not seem to spill out, containing anything that was inside the ocean.
Looking deeper inside the hollow cave that hosted the black sea, Bari watched its depths writhe with countless things.
At first he mistook them for motes of dust. Then for insects. Then, with a sick lurch, he realised what they were: nightmare creatures vast enough that distance had made them look like ants.
His stare seemed to stir the abyss itself. Hundreds of thousands of presences turned as one, their notice pressing down on him like a mountain. His vision cracked and blurred. Pain lanced through his skull as though his Aspect was revolting against what it had revealed.
Runes. Names. Lines of knowledge came flooding into him all at once, a screaming torrent that hammered his mind without mercy. His knees buckled. Blood welled hot and thin from his nose, pattering against the black sand. He tore his gaze away, staggering, fighting to keep upright.
It wasn't their gazes that hurt him. His attribute shielded him from such simple assaults. No, the agony came from what he now knew.
The creatures below were not only countless — each one bore surfaces that shone like mirrors, their scales reflecting the little light that seemed to radiate from anglerfish-like nightmare creatures. Eyes and carapaces glistened within the black sea. Light reflected endlessly from one to another, an infinite hall of mirror-like scales that forced Bari's Aspect to chase reflections without end. He had weathered infinity before, and survived it. But this was worse.
The true wound came from the flood of knowledge. Every reflection carried with it a dissection — their strengths, their weaknesses, their patterns of essence, their nature. Normally his eyes unravelled a target in neat detail, a book read at speed but still comprehensible. Now, it was as though a thousand such books had been slammed open and read aloud at once, page after page screaming through his skull.
His mind drowned beneath it. Thought became sludge. His brain quivered on the edge of collapse, struggling to hold shape as endless truths poured in, too fast, too many.
Still, the images clung to his mind — millions of titanic beings squirming in the drowned dark, all sealed away by runes thinner than glass.
For the first time in years, Bari shivered.
The Dark City suddenly looked like salvation.
He turned from the Spire, from its well and its waiting Terror, and pressed deeper into the coral maze. Hours passed as he walked, doubling back to avoid hunting packs, slipping between creatures that instinctively blocked his way. At last, exhausted, he found what he needed — a hollow coral with a narrow crack at its base.
He slipped inside.
The passage twisted upward at a cruel angle, scraping his shoulders raw as he dragged himself higher. At times he had to flatten himself, inching forward with fingers clawing at the coral walls. Then came a vertical drop that forced him headfirst into darkness, then another climb, his body screaming with strain.
Finally, he emerged into a chamber.
It was small, cramped, but mercifully hollow. He needed to crouch to move within. It was a simple chamber that housed a pocket of air in case of a flood or anything alike suddenly decided to swarm the coral labyrinth. If the world flooded like he suspected it might, this chamber should house enough air to survive several days. Enough to live.
He exhaled and sank to the ground, exhausted. He had not found anything to eat, only drink, and that was only because he climbed one of the corals to drink from the water that sat atop the occasional bowl-shaped coral.
As he pondered this and looked up, he saw a faint glow that threaded through the chamber walls above him. Essence, siphoned from dead nightmare creatures within the labyrinth, coursed through his refuge like veins of light. Since he was still considerably close to the Spire, the streaks were considerable, and constant as they pulsed gently, feeding toward the Spire in the distance.
For a moment, Bari wondered what would happen if he touched the flowing essence. If the current could be diverted, and he could absorb it — or if the coral itself would try to drain him too.
The thought made his pulse race. He closed his eyes, forced his breathing steady, and reached his hand out. Touching the walls of the roof of the chamber, he felt the essence being absorbed into himself, just like a soul shard would when broken.
Bari stayed there for a moment before checking his runes, his hand still on the coral.
***
Name: Bari
True Name: Will-Born
Rank: Dreamer
Soul Core: Dormant
Soul Fragments: [81/1000]
Memories: [Strider's Earrings], [Knight Armour 24], [Deceiving Pouch], [Sunset]
Echoes: —
Attributes: [Flames of Divinity], [The Fire], [Unique Being], [Divine Protection]
Innate Ability: [Unique Being]
Aspect: [Eyes of Genesis]
Aspect Rank: Divine
Aspect Abilities: [Insight]
Flaw: [Oath Keeper]
***
This… is insane, Bari thought to himself.
Every second he placed his hands on the wall and essence flowed into him, he gained one soul fragment.
Soul Fragments: [97/1000]
It just kept on going, sometimes pausing for a few seconds before continuing. He wondered why he was getting so much essence — even the Terror wasn't gaining this much.
As he continued thinking, he realised it was due to several key factors. For one, unlike the Terror, he wasn't sharing the soul essence with an entire sun. Two, he was in one of the main coral roots that stretched toward the tower. Finally, he was closer to the roots than the Terror was. The essence thinned the longer it travelled, and as he was closer, it meant he gained a significant amount more than the Terror. This did not mean he gained more overall — while he was consuming one of the main essence roots, the Terror was attached to tens that were as thick as a human being.
This made Bari smile. If he stayed here, he could saturate his core in hours — a day at most, if he was unlucky. As he continued to muse, the light that bathed the sky suddenly dimmed. Night was falling upon the world, and with it came the black ocean.
It began slowly, subtle enough that only Bari noticed at first. He turned, scanning the horizon, trying to guess where the sea originated. His first thought was the Spire — but to his surprise, it was not.
So he stared into the distance, his headache returning but at a manageable level. Then he saw it: from the crater, the black sea spilled forth in waves that drowned the world. Creatures of harrowing sizes and shapes spilled forth.
Bari could not help but admire the sight from a distance — a world collapsing, drowning while creatures of every size and shape tore it asunder. And through it all, he continued to grow stronger.