Chapter 157: 155 – Memory of Change

Its fetters burst and dissolved under the strain of Red’s soul swelling from the surfeit of Azoth-Aether compound, until the Queen’s maddening influence had faded altogether. It was through this freedom that she had chosen to contact the Emperor and abandon the Queen, for had the Queen had a say in the matter, she would’ve had her die in her defense with the Ikesian traitor and that pitiable pseudo-homunculus.

Only… When the talisman’s power pulled her being through the Fog-sea’s waves, she was caught in a net of the dungeon’s making, suspended in cosmic nothingness.Whether through its own gates or those of others, it seemed the Dungeon Core held absolute sway over aether travel within its own walls.

One moment she stood in the midst of the battle-torn core chamber, and the next…

...She was nowhere.

---

Floating upon a sea of Fog-shrouded mercury.

Cold, wet nothingness, stretching unto the horizon.

Witness to an empty sky.

Feeling an empty numbness.

Surrounded by utter, deafening silence.

Then, a thunderous utterance that stirred the ocean into waves.

An overwhelming voice from everywhere and nowhere, whose ethereal tones made the brain resonate and the skull threaten to split open, as if crystalline stakes erupting from the skull… 

“Thief of mine essence, who wouldst seek to spirit away that which thou hast stolen from me by arcane trickery…”

The pain of it all jolted her from her stupor. 

There were no stakes threatening to erupt from her head, for they were already there, already wrenching her skull apart, uneven and sticking out every-which way like the spikes of a morning star, the shrapnel in a grenade corpse, the arrows in a dead knight’s back. 

Armor-bugs dug their legs into her flesh, whether they were dead or alive only discernible by whether their hooked talons pierced into meat. Parasites wriggled in her stomach, inside her veins and organs. 

And the words, oh, the words… With each thunderous proclamation, the mercurial waters stirred to ripples and waves and her head rang like a bell.

“Thou acted not entirely of thy own volition in assisting the Parasite, driven by the false motivation of geasa and soul-bindings.” 

Innumerable segmented tendrils ripped her down into the depths, wrought of blackstone and from their seams shining an iridescent light. The cosmic waters threatened to crush her very being, her plates and armor-bugs giving beneath its might and flaking away as the unknown force dragged her yet deeper down.

And yet, no darkness came. The deeper it pulled her the brighter her surroundings became, and how she saw through these waters of mercury she had no clue. 

A great city floated far above it all in the distance, past the pillars of an incomprehensibly-grand cage. They were the only things she could fix her eyes upon  from down here, but her sight faded into blinding pain as the voice returned once more.

“In permitting thee to exit mine confines, I shall scour thy being of these defilements.”

The tendrils slithered about, from their points extending myriad tools with which they cut, burned off, severed, and ripped away all the insects upon the exterior of the body. 

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Further still, tendril after tendril plunged into her stomach and her limbs, passing through skin as if it were not even there. She felt the pulses of intense thrumming numbness and the cessation of movement as the parasites within her were exterminated. 

Despite it all, despite what she knew should have been excruciatingly painful, there was no screaming impulse, no dull pounding, no primal demand to stop whatever was happening to her.

There was only purification… And then the voice returned, and with it, pain.

“Thou shalt walk the land a sovereign, and thy free will’s buckling against thine manufactured allegiances shall be thy punishment. Should thou succeed in shedding thine shackles… Thou shalt have eternity to contend with.”

The further down it dragged her, the more all-consuming the light became. 

Soon, she saw naught but light, in the moments when the skull-shattering ache subsided enough to see.

A command, inexorable and absolute.

“NOW, REMAKE THYSELF IN THINE OWN IMAGE. IF THOU ART TO STEAL THE FLAME OF CREATION, THE LEAST THOU CANST DO IS WIELD IT PROPERLY.”

With a forceful yank from the tendrils, light consumed everything…

---

...And she fell upon the wet stone of a cavern, immediately shaken by pain and gripped by the urge to vomit. The myriad dead, mutilated armor-bugs - from beetles to centipedes - which she had been made to wear, rained down around her alongside many severed chitin-fragments.

For hours from that point her existence was vomiting. The expulsion of dead parasites.

Even those which had resided far from the stomach somehow found its way out that route, and soon she found why. Those words kept ringing in her head, over and over and over and over and over.

“Remake thyself. Remake thyself. Remake thyself.”

The only light to illuminate her surroundings was the dim glow of the spikes which protruded from her skull, yellow crusted hemolymph caking her hair, trapping pieces of bone and skin amidst its strands alike. 

In a puddle of her own blood and disgorgement, Red saw the reflection of a broken, filthy, bereaved thing.

Visceral disgust rose up within her, and with it the full intent to undo what the Locust Queen had done to her… And that head-splitting resonance rang out in her skull again.

No future, past, or greater picture concerned her now, only an ever-ongoing present and a state of self that Red wanted nothing more than to change. 

“So be it… As the dungeon remakes its own halls, so shall I remake myself!” she proclaimed, solely to reinforce her own paper-thin confidence. Every mental exercise, every vague gesture, every means of progressing past a tenuous bottleneck in martial training. Reaching out, trying to grasp mutagen-making parasites that she knew were no longer there, but still hoped that the methods for commanding them would grasp this so-called “flame of creation” that now resided in her skull.

...And change came.

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