A dull, rhythmic throb occupied his temples and showed no sign of leaving.
Oscar opened his eyes.
The ceiling was yellowed with age, a long crack running from the corner toward the center where someone had patched it poorly and left it at that. Pale grey light came in through the single window on the far wall, the kind of flat, cold light that belonged to late February when the sky couldn't be bothered to do anything more interesting than be overcast. The room itself was a small bed, a table with a washbasin, a coat hanging by the door and smelled of damp wool and extinguished candles.
He sat up. The bed frame creaked.
February 26th, 1358.
He had transmigrated.
Even with the bloated, uncomfortable feeling in his gut, Oscar's mind was surprisingly clear. He was in the body of a seventeen year old boy somewhere in the Intis Republic Sequence 8 of the Abyss pathway, an Unwinged Angel, with the characteristic from before his Sequence 9 potion had fully settled still sitting in his blood like an uninvited houseguest with no intention of leaving.
He pressed his palm flat against his stomach and grimaced.
The predecessor had consumed a raw Sequence 8 characteristic while the potion beneath it hadn't finished stabilizing. It was the sort of decision that made Oscar wonder what, exactly, had been going through the man's head.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floorboards were cold through his socks. He noticed, without particular feeling about it, that the socks were worn almost through at the heels.
There was a stub of candle on the windowsill. It had burned out sometime in the night and left a waxy trail down onto the floor that no one had scraped up. The fireplace on the opposite wall still held a few embers, though barely. A coat hung by the door was dark wool, slightly damp. A worn boot sat shoved against the baseboard. Oscar looked around the room for its partner and didn't find one.
He looked at the coat again.
He needed to move. Cordu's incident was at most three days away, and between his unstable spiritual state and the fact that the CurlyHaired Baboons Research Society would take one look at his pathway and politely decline to associate with him, there was really only one direction to go.
The Fool.
Oscar moved to the center of the room, nudged the bootless boot aside with his foot, and knelt. He kept it simple, no ritual array, nothing that would draw attention. Just posture, just the words, the honorific names recited low and carefully in ancient Hermes with the kind of genuine reverence that came from having read the LOTM books and knowing exactly who he was addressing.
The fireplace surged.
The flames were pale and heatless, nothing like normal fire, and they lasted only a moment before dropping back to embers. An envelope struck the floorboards two feet in front of his knees. Oscar picked it up, tore it open, and read the address inside.
Trier. February 27th.
He sat down against the wall beneath the window.
The relief lasted about thirty seconds before his brain caught up to him.
He knew the Great Old Ones by name. He knew the Cosmos in its entirety. He had woken up with all of that knowledge already sitting in his head, organized and accessible, at Sequence 8 spirituality and the Mother Tree of Desire had not immediately made herself at home inside his skull. The True Creator had not turned him inside out. He had simply woken up, had a headache, and gone about his morning.
Oscar turned this over several times and arrived at no satisfying answer. There was no explanation he could see. He set it aside the way you set aside a problem you cannot currently solve and noted it for later.
He stood, crossed to the table, and splashed his face with the cold water from the basin.
Then he closed his eyes and went looking for the door, the one that the Abyss pathway had made considerably easier to find. Not a door exactly. More a sensation, a conceptual seam between the mortal world and the depths. As an Unwinged Angel, it was less finding the entrance and more realizing he'd been standing in the corridor for quite some time.
He spoke into it plainly.
He told the Tenebrous World what it needed to know. Cordu and what was coming, the nature of Termiboros's descent, the Rose School of Thought and what it had become. The Chained God hollowed into a vessel, the Great Old Ones' patient lateral hunger that required no collapse of barriers, only thinning, and time, and human beings looking in the wrong directions. He laid it all out without performance because a Sefirah steeped in desire and depravity could read the wants of a soul the way a merchant reads ledgers for the honest numbers, not the presentation.
"If you choose me," he said, "you won't end up wholly consumed by Her."
Silence.
Below the window, a cart moved across uneven cobblestones somewhere down the street. The sound faded.
The shadows came off the walls.
The floorboards darkened in slow spreading patches, something thick and black seeping up from between the boards, carrying a sweetness under the iron smell that didn't improve the longer he thought about it. A chain resolved from the condensing dark and struck his right arm heavy, unornamented, wrapping twice with the brisk efficiency of something that had already decided. His spirituality dropped sharply.
The mist thickened. A figure formed within it.
Oscar looked up.
She was tall. Long black hair, pale skin, hovering a fraction above the floorboards in the manner of something that found the concept of a floor negotiable. Not wearing anything. The shadows around her were making what could generously be called a token effort. She regarded him from above with eyes that were either entirely dark or contained something that resisted easy categorization.
Oscar stared.
He was aware, somewhere in the part of his brain still running administrative functions, that he should be focused on the contract. The weight of the permanent chain on his arm. The fact that he had just bound himself to a Sefirah of the Abyss in a rented room in an Intis village three days before a catastrophe.
He stared anyway.
It occurred to him, in the same detached way that one might notice the date on a newspaper, that he had a type. And that this was a genuinely terrible time to discover it.
"This avatar will form a life and death contract with you," she said. Her voice reached the part of his attention that the body reserved for things it had decided to pay full mind to regardless of permission. "Based upon the truths you have spoken. It shall also manifest whenever required to traverse the shadows and deliver your missives, anywhere in this world."
"Understood," Oscar said.
He met her eyes for what he considered a respectable duration before the poorly patched ceiling crack became very interesting.
She laughed, low and unhurried, and dissolved back into the mist. The black fluid was gone from the floorboards as though it had never been. The room was cold and dim and exactly as it had been, the dead candle still on the sill, the coat still damp by the door.
The chain remained on his arm. It was heavier than it looked.
Oscar sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at his right arm for a long moment.
Trier, he reminded himself. February 27th. And new socks before anything else.
Though the thought did cross his mind of if it would still count if he lost his virginity to a Sefirot though he quickly got back to thinking.