The sky was overcast. The moon peeked overhead. In the distance, there was a plume of smoke, growing closer and closer. There was a gentle thrum in the air. My heartbeat. Somehow menacing. My new domain.
Evil is fear.
Evil is hate.
Evil is war. It is murder. It is lies, deceit, pain and misery. And now, all of those things were in my head, threatening to define me as they did the Evil Eye.
Thankfully, I was not a sentient eyeball born off a deity that wanted to jettison its contradictions away. I was a living breathing person, full of contradictions all my life, and with a lifetime's worth of experience in handling them. I would not let Evil consume me. I would embrace all of the contradictions of Evil, all of the knowledge that I had gained, and would not dismiss any of it. The thrumming in my ears died down. I blinked. The world seemed a little brighter. I smiled.
The Immortal in the pit would not stay down forever. I did not know how long it would take him to find another domain to center his personality around, but he would find something eventually. Until then, I would have some breathing room against the Simurgh and Madness. Especially with the way those two were softening each other up right now. I was tempted to wait a little longer, but I knew I couldn't anger Madness right now. Taking on the two of them at once was definitely beyond my capabilities, especially because Desire and Madness were much more difficult domains for me to attack. The Evil Eye had been created to separate the Simurgh's contradictions from its main body, which was why it took upon itself such a simple and insufficient definition of its core domain. The other two had built their personalities around much more robust ideas.
I jumped off the ground and flew towards the cloud of smoke. Forests passed by and I crossed over a large river. I realized this smoke was on the other side of where it had been when I went into the pit. The battle between Madness and the Simurgh had ravaged the landscape, leaving massive gashes, craters, and ashy forests in its wake. The two Immortals were duking it out in an open field somewhere on the wild steppes of the continent. I couldn't quite figure out where this place was at a glance, but I knew Kelser and the others might be relatively nearby unless they had had the good sense to run as far as possible after I dropped them off with my magic.
A deafening boom filled my ear.
Something crashed into the ground near me, sending a column of smoke in my face. I shielded myself with magic, quickly clearing the air so I could see what was going on.
Madness lay flat on the ground, his crooked grin facing the sky where the moon smiled back at him. I met his gaze and he asked me how I was doing. I told him I was doing well and that I had taken over Evil's core domain.
"Oh, I knew that," said Madness. "You made my beloved extra angry with that. We can sense when domains get taken over by others, you see. My beloved may have separated Evil on its own, but nobody likes seeing a former part of themselves get taken over by a stranger."
"Aren't you a stranger to this world too?" I said.
"Yeah, but me and my beloved," said Madness as he picked himself up again. "We go way back. You wouldn't understand, kid. In fact, I know you wouldn't understand. You know what my Ikon used to say about you?"
Right, Noel had become his Ikon for some reason. Still hadn't figured out why. "No. And are you sure you have the time to be chatting like this right now?"
He waved a hand. "It'll be okay. Beloved's trying to see if the domain of Evil can still be pushed against. Just in case you didn't manage to take it over completely or something. I know you wouldn't mess up like that, though. Noel may have hated your naivete and thick-headed approach to other people's problems, but she spoke highly of your abilities."
I blinked. "Er, thanks I guess. Wait, what?"
"Yes, she said you were very smart and all that. You just love getting complimented don't you? She said something about that too," said Madness with a shameless shake of the head.
"No, I meant, naive? Thick headed? What does that mean?" I said.
"It means she thought you were easy to manipulate and you didn't care about other people's issues as much as you did your own," he said.
"That's not true. I mean, the naive part maybe, but I care about other people. I helped the elves and humans become stronger, shared my inventions with them and everything. I've saved lives. I even tried to help Noel find her family. It isn't my fault you and the Simurgh worked together to send us into the future," I said.
"Yes, yes, you helped the elves fight a fire or two, but couldn't be bothered to help develop their technology. And when you shared your modern knowledge with the humans, you never shared anything that might threaten your control over their society. Those were my conclusions based off of what Noel told me, by the way. She didn't actually say that part," he said. "And again, it wasn't my fault the two of you didn't realize my beloved is fickle and proud. Why should my beloved care that the two of you will lose your past if you dared to talk to me for so long? You should think about that some more, I think."
I frowned. It was pointless to argue with him if he was going to bend over backwards to defend the Simurgh. I still wasn't sure why his relationship with the Simurgh was still so extreme. Now that there was a chance to return to our world without the Simurgh's domain of Annihilation, surely, even Madness didn't need to care so much about the Simurgh anymore?
"Well, whatever. I have the domain of Evil now and the Evil Eye, if we can even call him that anymore, is incapacitated. Tell me, what is the plan now?" I said.
Madness nodded his head. "There are two objectives. The first, is to find out how my beloved summoned you to this world. If we can figure that part out, we can try to use that knowledge to return to our world. But just in case that doesn't work, taking away the domain of Annihilation from my beloved is our plan b. It should be a lot easier to do both of them now that the red star is out of the way."
"I guess attacking the domain of Annihilation would be like the fight I had with the red star. But what about finding out about the way I was summoned. Wasn't that technically done by the red star? Shouldn't we be trying to interrogate the other Immortal?" I said.
"No, the red star only initiated the summoning. The actual power for the summoning was provided by my beloved. I know this because I was able to push against my beloved's domains after your summoning. Only my beloved knows which domain or magic power allows people to leave this world. We have to figure out a way to extract that knowledge during our battle," he said.
I frowned. "Wait. Didn't you come to this world on your own? I never understood why you couldn't just go back the way you came."
Madness nodded slowly. "Yes, I came to this reality from our world during one of my meditations. It was kind of like a lucid dream, I am not sure how I did it exactly. Still, I had been looking for my beloved for a long time and managed to be in the right place at the right time so I scooped up a bunch of free floating domains. They were kind of like big wads of light and they tasted really nice."
"You ate the domains?" I said.
"Hey, this was before this world was really born you know. Everything was kinda like a strange haze, a world without the same dimensions and stuff. Time, for instance, didn't exist in the separated form that it exists in today. Even now, after you unified the temporal domains, you could've brought time back to that strange state it had been in when I first came to this world. All I did when I got here was follow my instincts and make decisions based off of the knowledge I collected on that first day," said Madness.
"If you came to this world with meditations or whatever, couldn't we return to our world the same way or something? Just tell me what kind of breathing exercises you did or something, I don't know," I said.
"It's not that simple. Remember, this world hadn't been created back then at all. I didn't come to this world in my physical body. Hell, I didn't even come to this world at all. I came to the metaphysical or spiritual world that surrounds this physical world. You know what I'm talking about. You've been there, haven't you?" said Madness.
My eyes widened. "Nothingness?"
"That sounds like a decent word for it. Yes, Nothingness. I came to that world at first. I was trapped inside this physical world by my beloved and haven't been able to leave it since. It's why I wanted the domain of Annihilation. By shedding my physical form and merging with my beloved's spiritual being, I would arrive in the Nothingness and could try to return to my world through meditation from there. See? I'm not completely irrational, you know," said Madness. He began to laugh.
A wild cry came from the distance.
"The Simurgh is coming," I said as I readied my new domain of Evil and a bunch of other magic.
"Yes," said Madness as he turned towards the cry. "I'd like to think it is coming over for a kiss."