The world of stone and shadow dissolved. The weight of the physical body, the chill of the air, the scent of incense—it all faded away, replaced by a landscape of pure thought. I was no longer standing on a staircase in the Mournblade family crypt-slash-mansion. I was somewhere else. Somewhere inside.
I stood in a vast, unending graveyard under a perpetually grey and starless sky. Tombstones, ancient and weathered, stretched to a horizon that never got any closer. The trees were skeletal, their bare branches clawing at the oppressive sky like desperate hands. The ground was a carpet of dead leaves and powdered bone that crunched underfoot with a sound like whispering. This was the Mournblade mental landscape, the shared geography of our minds. It was as cheerful and welcoming as a tax audit.
And I was not alone.
A few yards away, a figure stood with his back to me, staring at a particularly ostentatious mausoleum carved with the Mournblade family crest—a weeping skull crowned with thorns. He was a gaunt figure, dressed in the same funereal black I had just put on, his form flickering and indistinct, like a projection on smoke.
As I watched, my own form solidified. I looked down and saw not the pale, skeletal hands of Damon Mournblade, but my own. Soft, pudgy, and utterly useless in a fight. I was wearing the clothes I had died in: a slightly-too-tight polo shirt with my company's logo, sensible slacks, and comfortable shoes. I was Azrael, the overweight, ordinary man I had been my entire life. I looked profoundly, comically out of place in this gothic nightmare.
The figure turned. It was the face from the mirror, but stripped of its cold beauty, worn down by a despair so profound it was a physical attribute. His pale grey eyes were hollow, and his soul—for that is what this apparition was—seemed to be fraying at the edges, shedding little wisps of darkness into the grey air. This was Damon Mournblade. The genuine article.
He looked at me, his gaze taking in my soft physique and my ridiculous corporate attire. A flicker of something—contempt, perhaps, or just weary resignation—passed across his spectral face.
"So," he said, and his voice was not the cold cello I had been using. It was a whisper, thin and brittle as autumn leaves. "You are the interloper. The thing that crawled into my body when I should have died."
My own voice, my real voice, felt rusty from disuse. "I… I didn't ask for this," I stammered. "I was just… eating a sandwich." The words sounded insane even to my own ears.
Damon gave a dry, mirthless chuckle that sounded like grinding stones. "A sandwich. How fittingly mundane. I was attempting to bind a minor void-specter and botched the final sigil. The backlash should have annihilated my soul. Instead… it pulled you from wherever you were and crammed you into the space I was vacating." He gestured vaguely at the grey landscape. "Welcome to the wreckage."
My mind reeled. *A botched summoning. That's what the "illness" was.* The novel never explained it, just that he was sick. The Vex'Arak conspiracy, the grand summoning of the Outer God Xylos at Lumina Academy… that was the main event. But it seemed Damon had been dabbling in his own, smaller-scale reality-tearing. It was a family hobby, apparently.
";Why aren't you gone?" I asked, the question blunt. "If the summoning failed, why are you still here?"
"My soul is anchored to this bloodline, to this place," he whispered, his form flickering more violently. "The backlash tore it to shreds, but it could not fully sever the connection. I am too weak to command the body. Too weak to even manifest for more than a few moments. But I am too stubborn to simply fade." He looked at me, his hollow eyes seeming to pierce right through me. "And you… you are an anomaly. A soul with no connection to this world, no anchor. You are keeping the body alive, but you are a foreigner. You don't belong. You can't even walk properly."
He was right. The clumsiness, the disconnect I felt—it was because I was just a pilot. I didn't have the owner's manual.
"I am dying," Damon stated, the words devoid of self-pity. It was a simple, clinical observation. "What remains of my soul cannot sustain itself. It will unravel completely within a day. And when I go, your tenuous grip on this body will fail. The body will die. And you, a soul with no anchor, will be cast out into the void between worlds. You will not get a third life."
A cold dread, far worse than the simple fear of death, washed over me. To be annihilated, to cease to exist entirely… The finality of it was absolute.
"So what's the point of this?" I demanded, a surge of my old frustration breaking through the fear. "You brought me here just to tell me we're both doomed?"
"I brought you here to offer a bargain," he said, his form stabilizing slightly as he focused his will. "I cannot survive alone. You cannot survive without me. Separately, we are dead. But together…"
He let the word hang in the dead air. I knew what he was suggesting. The concept was a staple of the genre I loved so much. Fusion. Merger.
"You want to merge?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "Our souls? Our minds?"
"It is the only logical solution,"; Damon said, the cold, calculating part of his personality showing through. "My soul is native to this world, anchored to this body and its Death affinity. Your soul is… something else. It is robust, healthy, and it contains… knowledge." He tilted his head. "I have felt it. Glimpses. You see these people—my brother, my family—and you see their futures. You know things you should not know. That knowledge is a weapon. A powerful one."
He knew about my memories of the novel. The thought was terrifying. My one and only advantage, and he could feel it.
"If we merge," he continued, "we might create something that can survive. A new entity. My connection, my training, my affinity. Your knowledge, your… vitality. We share control. We share everything. Together, we live. What do you say, Azrael the Accountant?"
He had called me by my name. He had been sifting through my memories just as I had been stumbling through his. We were two ghosts haunting the same house, and it was getting crowded.
Did I have a choice? I could refuse. I could hold onto my identity, my sense of self, for one more day before being utterly annihilated. Or I could sacrifice the man I was for a chance to continue existing as… something else. It wasn't a choice. It was a death sentence with a single, desperate appeal attached.
"What happens to… us?" I asked, gesturing between my soft, fleshy form and his flickering, spectral one. "Who will be in charge?"
"Neither of us," Damon said, a strange, almost hungry light in his hollow eyes. "And both of us. It will be a synthesis. A new consciousness will be born from the fusion. It will have my memories and your memories. My personality and yours. It will be a battle for dominance that never ends, a permanent state of internal coalition. It will be… interesting."
*Interesting* was one word for it. *A living hell* was another. But a living hell was still, technically, living.
I looked around the endless graveyard, at the grey sky, at the skeletal trees. This was the alternative. Silence. Nothingness. The end of the story. I had spent my entire life reading stories, escaping into them. Now, I was in one. And my character was about to be killed off on page three. If I wanted to see page four, I had to do something drastic. I had to become someone else.
"I agree," I said, the words feeling like a betrayal of the man I had been.
Damon's spectral form nodded, a flicker of what might have been relief or triumph crossing his features. "Then let us begin. Do not fight it. To resist is to be torn apart."
He raised a hand, and the grey world began to dissolve. The tombstones melted like wax. The sky cracked like glass. A hurricane of raw information, of pure sensation, erupted from both of us.
The merger was agony.
It was not a gentle blending. It was a violent collision. I felt my entire life—forty-two years of mundane existence, of spreadsheets and lonely microwave dinners and the smell of old paperbacks—slamming into twenty-three years of cold, aristocratic despair, of necromantic rituals and the crushing weight of being the lesser son.
Memories, not my own, flooded me. The first time Damon felt the cold touch of Death affinity, a comforting silence in his soul. The sting of his father's disappointment. The quiet pride of mastering a complex ancestral resonance ritual. The bitter envy watching Marcus laugh and charm his way through life.
Simultaneously, I felt my own personality being ripped apart and analyzed. My love for fantasy novels, my cynical sense of humor, my deep-seated insecurity, my secret desire to have been someone important—all of it was laid bare, dissected, and then woven into the fabric of Damon's cold, calculating mind.
Azrael was being overwritten. Damon was being overwritten. I felt my sense of self, the "I" that was Azrael, begin to fray and dissolve. I clung to it, terrified, but Damon's warning echoed in the chaos: *To resist is to be torn apart.* I let go. I surrendered.
In the heart of the storm, a new consciousness sparked into being. It was not Azrael. It was not Damon. It was something else. It opened its new eyes, and it saw everything. It saw the life of an accountant on a world called Earth. It saw the life of a necromancer's son on a world called Aethelgard. It saw the pages of a novel, the plot twists and betrayals laid out like a map. And it saw a path to survival. A path that neither Azrael nor Damon could have walked alone.
The storm subsided. The world of stone and shadow snapped back into focus.
I—*he*—was standing on the grand staircase, one hand braced on the balustrade. The body felt different. It was no longer an alien machine. It was mine. The long limbs, the coiled strength, the cold stillness—it all felt natural, familiar.
He raised his head and opened his eyes. For a fraction of a second, they flickered with impossible colors—a deep, abyssal black shot through with veins of chaotic violet, the non-colors of the Outside. Then, just as quickly, they settled back into their familiar, placid pale grey.
A new entity looked out at the world of Aethelgard. He had Azrael's knowledge and Damon's power. He knew the story. And he was going to rewrite it.