Chapter 15:The Hallowed Descendant of Ruin
A heavy, expectant silence clung to the dimly lit room, thick as dust motes dancing in the slivers of lantern light. Xiall stared down at the simple meal before him--a hunk of brown bread, a wedge of hard cheese, a bowl of some kind of stew whose steam had long since ceased to rise. He should have been ravenous. His body felt hollowed out, scraped clean. But the knot of confusion tightening in his chest was a far more effective suppressant than any lack of hunger. Food felt… trivial, compared to the storm raging inside his head.
It was a loop, a maddening carousel of questions with no answers. He knew the facts, or at least, the sequence of events as he remembered them. The bathing chamber. The sudden, dizzying weakness. The cold, hard impact of the floor against his bare back. The unmistakable sensation of his consciousness--himself--simply… switching off. Like a snuffed candle.
And then, the white void. The Great Tree. That part was burned into his memory with terrifying clarity. But everything after the fall was a black pit, and everything that connected the two was a fragile bridge of impossible logic.
How? The question was a drumbeat in his skull. How did a body, empty of its guiding spark, simply get up and move? A vessel without a captain doesn't sail itself to shore. It drifts. It sinks. It certainly doesn't walk out of a room, get dressed in a clean, soft tunic that smelled faintly of lavender and lye, and find its way to a table. The sheer absurdity of it made his head spin.
Okay, think, Xiall. Think. Maybe he'd just… sleepwalked. Yeah. People did that, didn't they? They got up and did things in their sleep. Perfectly normal. Well, not perfectly normal, but it was a thing that happened in the world. A known thing. A medical thing. Not a… a mystical, soul-crushing thing. He clung to the idea like a drowning man to a splintered plank. Maybe I just sleepwalked. It's the only thing that makes sense.
But the voice in the back of his mind, the one that sounded suspiciously like cold, hard reason, whispered a different truth. It was stark, undeniable. You didn't. And he knew it. The movement hadn't felt like the clumsy, uncoordinated shuffling of a sleepwalker. The memory was hazy, more a feeling than an image--a sense of purposeful motion, of limbs being directed by a will that was not his own. It was the difference between a leaf blown by the wind and an arrow shot from a bow.
Which led him to the far more terrifying possibilities. An alter ego? A second self, lurking in the shadows of his own mind, waiting for him to black out so it could take the wheel? The thought was enough to send a cold sweat prickling down his spine. Sharing your head, the one place that was supposed to be yours and yours alone… it was a violation of the highest order. It was madness.
Or… was it the Tree? The Colossal Soul Tree. The name itself inspired a primal dread. If it could devour souls, drawing them into its glowing, terrifying expanse, couldn't it also push something out? Couldn't it use a vacant body as a puppet, its roots acting as strings for the puppeteer? That seemed terrifyingly likely. He found himself latching onto this theory not because it was the most logical, but because it was, paradoxically, less personal, and therefore, less frightening than the idea of a permanent roommate in his own skull. An external monster was always preferable to an internal one.
Gods, please, he prayed to any entity that might be listening, let whatever it was that piloted me have had some common sense. Let it not have robbed Old Matt, or insulted a guardsman, or danced naked in the town square. But the evidence suggested otherwise. He was here, wasn't he? Clean, clothed, and apparently invited to supper. The puppet had been disturbingly competent. That, in itself, was alarming.
A soft groan escaped his lips before he could stop it. It was all too much.
"Seems you've no hunger… uhm… Reeking Man."
The words, laced with a blunt indifference, sliced through his spiraling thoughts like a knife. He flinched, his eyes snapping up to find their source: the auburn-haired girl, staring at him from across the wooden table as if he were a mildly interesting stain on the floor.
Reeking Man. The name echoed in his head, and a flush of embarrassment warmed his cheeks. What a truly awful name. Who looked at a person and decided that was a suitable label? Yeah he knew he smelled a bit… rustic earlier but It wasn't his fault! He'd been through… well, he didn't quite know what he'd been through, but it certainly hadn't involved regular access to a bathhouse. And honestly, in the grand scheme of being devoured by a cosmic tree and having his body hijacked, a little body odor seemed like a pretty minor offense. My nostrils must have given up on me, he thought wryly. Too busy being terrified of my surroundings to bother reporting the state of their own host.
His train of thought, ever-eager to escape the main track of his troubles, veered off again. The clothes. This tunic was undeniably nice. Soft, well-woven linen, not the rough-spun wool he'd awoken in before. It smelled… good. Clean. Like comfort and normalcy. How had that happened? Did the mysterious puppeteer have a sense of fashion? Did it rifle through Old Matt's chests, holding up tunics and thinking, 'Hmm, no, not that one, the cut is all wrong for a vessel of an unknown cosmic force'? The absurdity was almost comforting.
He realized with a start that he'd been sitting in silence for too long, his face doubtless cycling through a series of bewildered expressions. Tiffany was still staring at him, her look now tinged with the kind of curiosity one reserves for a bug that has started behaving strangely. The last thing he needed was to earn a new nickname. 'Reeking Man' was bad enough; he didn't want to become 'Gaping Man' or 'Vacant-Stare Man'.
"Xiall," he stuttered, the name feeling foreign on his tongue. He needed to project control, to reassert himself. He met her indifferent gaze directly. "That is my name." He forced a smile, the kind he hoped was charming and disarming, a smile that said, 'I am a perfectly normal, charming fellow who definitely has full control of his own limbs and has never been used as a meat-puppet by a sentient tree.' "And… my thanks for the clothes." He made a slight gesture to the tunic, hoping the gratitude sounded genuine.
For a terrifying second, nothing changed on her face. The indifferent stare held. Had his smile malfunctioned? Backfired? Was he not the dashing, if slightly disheveled, figure he imagined himself to be? A sudden, crushing wave of self-doubt washed over him. Maybe near-death experiences and possession did nothing for one's charisma.
"Oh. Xiall," she said abruptly, her tone flat. "It has an odd ring to it." The blow landed softly but squarely. His coolest smile, and all he got was a comment on the oddness of his name. So much for a charming reputation.
"Tiffany, by the way," she added, almost as an afterthought, her voice grumpy, as if sharing the information was an immense inconvenience. "I work here for Old Matt." And with that, she turned her attention fully back to her dish, attacking her food with a focused intensity that clearly signaled the end of the conversation.
The dismissal was total. Xiall felt himself deflate, the brief burst of social energy leaving him even more drained than before. He turned back to his own cold stew. Right. Normal. He had to act normal. He picked up his spoon and began the arduous task of forcing the congealed food down his throat. Each swallow was a conscious effort, a battle against the revolt in his stomach. But he couldn't afford to be wasteful. He couldn't afford to draw more attention. Food was a luxury, and he was a guest, however strange the circumstances. He had to play the part.
But his mind, refusing to be subdued by lukewarm stew, wandered back into the labyrinth. The Halos. The blinding light. The Great Tree, not as a memory now, but as a physical presence he could almost feel imprinted on his soul. And the tendrils… Gods, the tendrils. He could still feel the ghost of their violation, not on his skin, but deep within his psyche. They hadn't just touched him; they had penetrated, boring holes through the very fabric of his being. And through those holes, they had forced a torrent of… others. A screaming, chaotic flood of countless consciousnesses, each with its own lifetime of memories, loves, regrets, and fears.
He had felt them all, vivid and real as his own. For a few terrifying moments, he hadn't been Xiall; he had been a legion. A king dying on a battlefield, a mother singing a lullaby, a thief fleeing through a moonlit alley--he had lived and died a thousand times. The sensation of sinking, of his own identity dissolving into that cacophonous ocean, was more terrifying than any physical pain. It was the ultimate death--the death of self.
Then, the warmth. The Halo. It had embraced him, a shield against the torrent, a anchor in the storm. It had pulled him back, reassembled the pieces of him that remained. But what was it? His memory of the colossal hand, crowned with its seven brilliant stars, was seared into his mind. It had taken the seven Halos. He was sure of it. But wait… were there seven? Or had there been eight? The memory flickered, unstable. A trick of the light? Or a missing piece of the puzzle?
And the Tree itself… why was it in his head? He had assumed it was a physical thing, a part of that ruined city-Eden,as he had assumed. But what if Eden wasn't a real place? What if the entire ordeal--he city, the tree, the hand--was just a construct of his dying mind, a fantastical allegory his brain had created to make sense of… of what? Passing out in a ditch? Had his life before this amnesiac wake-up in a field been so dull that his subconscious had to invent an epic, soul-shattering trauma to compensate? The questions began to crawl over each other, a tangled knot with no beginning and no end. It was a loophole, an ouroboros of doubt that started to make his brain physically hurt.
He sighed, pushing the bowl away, half-finished. He had to stop. The answers wouldn't come from chasing his own tail. He just had to hope, to desperately pray, that the ritual he had witnessed, the violation he had endured, had left no permanent mark. That he was still just Xiall, whoever that was.
The answer came not as a feeling, but as a pulse.
It was a cold, electrifying jolt that originated from the core of his being and radiated outwards. For a heart-stopping moment, the world dissolved into static, and he felt his consciousness teeter on the very brink of slipping away again, of being dragged back to that white void. He braced for the pull, the distortion.
But it didn't come. Instead of being pulled under, the world snapped into a focus so sharp it was almost painful.
Clarity.
It was the only word for it. His delayed heartbeat was a distinct, separate thump-thump in his ears. The gentle sway of the glowing lantern above became a slow, rhythmic dance, each arc calculated. He could hear the soft, wet squish as Old Matt's fork pierced a piece of meat on his plate across the room. He could hear the faint, almost imperceptible shhh-click of Tiffany's eyelids blinking. Outside, the gentle rustle of wheat in the night air was a symphony of individual stalks rubbing together, and the heavy, rhythmic breath of the sleeping donkey was a bellows in the silence. The distant, muffled chattering of the late-night traders in the square was no longer a indistinct murmur; he could almost pick out individual words, individual voices.
A wild, almost giddy thrill shot through him. This was… incredible! This was power. This was awareness. This was like seeing the world for the first time without a veil.
But the thrill was instantly chased by a cold, sharp spike of panic. This was not normal. This was profoundly, undeniably abnormal. This was the kind of thing that got you labeled as touched by the gods or, more likely, possessed by a demon. He couldn't let it show. He couldn't. He was already a stranger, an oddity. He forced his face into a mask of calm, pushing the panic down, burying it deep where it wouldn't show. You're already abnormal, he reminded himself. This is just… a new feature.
His eyes flicked up, and he saw that Tiffany had paused, her fork halfway to her mouth. Her gaze was on him, watchful, analytical. She had noticed something. A slight tension in his shoulders, a fleeting shift in his expression. She was far more observant than her grumpy exterior let on.
And then, as if a silent bell had been struck deep within the cathedral of his mind, a new sound resonated. Not the familiar, haunting call of "Eden" that had pulled him towards the ruin. This was different. It was a title, spoken not as a call, but as a statement, a declaration that seeped into his subconscious like a contagious whisper:
The Hallowed Descendant of Ruin.