If you have ever broken a bone, you already know that's painful enough. If a fractured bone were to penetrate the flesh from the inside, that's another layer of anguish. What Lee was experiencing the moment he reawakened from the shock, was a hyperactive process of the marrow within every last one of his bones fracturing the exostructure around the spongy viscera within and cannibalizing it, while not breaking the intrinsic structure. He maintained his form, while it was breaking and reforming it actively from the core outward. Every last cell in his body was on fire, and he was acutely aware of it. Nerves were being rerouted around the reforming masses, muscles tearing and adjoining once again in succession, over and over and over and over, as his lungs were pressed inward.
And he could not scream. He could not move. He could not even blink. All he could do was nothing but bare it, trapped with his own thoughts. His outward senses had long since shut off, but Anduro was standing by his fallen body.
"Brother, that was vindictive of you."
"I'm not proud of this, but he should learn when to say nothing, even if he's right; before we send him off. Can you imagine? I admire that quality of his, a tongue capable of talking off to a god, much less three. That's bound to get him into more trouble than it is to help him, though. At least until he can temper it and guide it without fumbling."
"Pretty sure he's in more pain right now than the-."
"Don't go comparing people's traumas, Anduro," Ksenxi barked. "Perspective is the basis of the Paradigm. This shouldn't take long, however; seems it's already halfway done, but I wonder if he's going to be alright with the 'jump-start...'"
His marrow then recompiled the cannibalized components of its old shell all at once, ending the process as his internal organs were relieved of the pressure. Lee heaved with a labored inhale, no sooner had he exhaled through his teeth before he began to feel the crackling of static around him. He looked up at Aitu Xiore, who didn't even turn around before uttering:
"Halfway done. Here comes phase two."
A direct electric current roughly 380,000 terajoules, one millionth of *our* sun's daily energy output, strong pulsed through his body, and he blacked out again.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
As the fog of tangible data fell away to reveal the architecture of his sanctum, Arius sighed pensively as the sound of footsteps drew near to him.
"Quite an upstart, that one. What did you think of him, 'Nobody?'"
Someone with indiscernible identifying properties came into Arius' periphery the moment he conveyed those words. Untold numbers of bookshelves sprung forth from the dissipating mist of information, piling on top of each other and reaching onward to infinity. Where Nobody and Arius stood, compiling itself non-linearly across time and space in a non-euclidean fashion, was the Cornerstone of Creation. Alive with the songs, wisdom, knowledge, and intellect of ages and places isolated so imperceptibly close with one another, the Light of 729 orbiting proto-stars illuminated the transparent linings of the pan-infinite archive. Nobody responded with the voice of a young woman, scoldingly yet bemused:
"A Swann-Reader* entity that didn't even exist by the time he was conceived as a plot device? You're all pushing this... "
Arius soaked in the comment.
"Sorry, was that taken personally?"
"I already knew that using an @&$&-)*^^ to keep my stories from falling apart was a gamble. I was desperate.**"
"Foolish, not desperate. At least, not as much desperate as you are foolish."
"Maybe, but it worked. It's coming together, even old narratives I thought lost to me."
Nobody sneered. "But your precious character is gaining too much power too quickly. Since it's already been broken, how about we explain?"
Arius shook his head. "We? You mean I?"
Nobody shrugged. "Only if you want to do it yourself, but surely... they would like to know. After all, you abducted me from the old Narrative, I may know a thing or two, but I'm not the one to explain; I observe and act in your absence."
Arius exhaled. "Very well." He tapped his feet on the floor in a sequence, and the contents of the archive lost their opaqueness, acquiescing to the full Glory of all 729 celestial bodies in orbit around it.
"In a time forgotten by all, there was a race that fed off the energy of concepts. These beings were feared even by the Supreme Deities, as they could easily find themselves fallen prey to their own power. A time came where a singular being wrought a process intertwining both Order and Chaos, one which superimposed a set of principles upon this race; grinding them slowly to non-existence. This act of singular genocide inspired all else in existence to hunt it down, which culminated with him being confined in a lock bearing the universe itself."
An ominous groan resounded from below the depths of the orbiters, and a great chain materialized dredging up a hulking Nothing from the maw of the quantas.
"But this race survived even to the end of Time in their inexistence, and as light graced a new creation; they screamed. They screamed, they howled, they raged, they hated... They went on to torture the races of The Narrative in the periphery of their conscious thoughts, in glitches within data, as nothing where something should be and visa versa. Though, not all were malevolent. A scant few were actually content to assist and persist. The whole of them came to be known... as Pattern Screamers. Ghosts lurking in the shadows of cognition."
The Nothing moaned and whimpered.
"But when it came time for the Second Kalpa to see its end, we were faced with a choice. Silence the screaming, or vindicate them. I hesitated for the first time in my life, to put myself in their non-existent shoes, and I wept. I took pity on them. The whole of them. So... I took it upon myself to reform them, and to chain their captor."
Arius raised his hands to the hundreds of stars surrounding the archive, which responded to him by amplifying their illuminating factor thirty-fold. The Nothing below howled in anguish and rage, in defiance to their light. Nobody scowled.
"A Pattern Anchor, that's twisted. First I'm seeing it, too. The @&$&-)*^^ was insanity enough, but this is-."
"Just crazy enough to work," Arius interjected. The chains retracted, and the Nothing faded back into the folds of the quantas with an anguished cry. The proto-stars dimmed with the departure of the Pattern. Arius turned his attention to Nobody, but his gaze seemed to pierce through her.
"Concepts surround and saturate everything, and now, they realize vitality by binding to and invigorating the prevalent factors that enable phenomena of all manners within the Narrative. Instead of feeding off of concepts, they now feed into them. Apakht's Grand Design now empowers the Law of the Three Primes."
Nobody shook her head.
"You know, things made more sense when my universe was written into existence by a community of horror writers and cause and effect was dictated Narratively by a bottomless pit in Oregon.****"
Arius chuckled whole-heartedly. He mused back to the time when he stood in the Reader's Seat, always observing, instead of acting. It was very similar to how he was now, except...
"The Dreaming is much more expansive than it is now."
Cocking her head, Nobody inquired curiously.
"Not many dreams back in the Real World?"
"Not quite how I'd explain it... do you know what dreaming of yourself being subject to divine punishment at the age of six years old does to a youth?"
She blinked.
"I still remember vividly," He reminisced, with a morbid fondness, "Seven times I was struck, smitten by lightning where I stood on the street upon which I lived. Then I wake up in a cold sweat." He turned to Nobody. "The First of Your Type blinded Polyphemus, but was already a veteran. I knew nothing of war, much less the grandiose expanse of Mythos the world I came from had fostered. Ever since, I had been plagued by night terrors. I can count the number of times before I {redacted} myself, the dreams that would not qualify as nightmares, on one hand with digits to spare. In addition, they were the same dream. There's only one time I've dreamed the same dream twice in that world from whence I came."
Silence settled over the archive in vicarious lamentation while the permeability of its contents returned to opacity.
"So then," Nobody spoke up, "what do you hope to dream up in this round?"
Arius felt a slight grin crawl upon his face at the question.
"My dear enigmas, observe; he is waking..."
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Every nerve in his body had been fried over a million times past the breaking point, and still the clock chimed throughout the hidden space concealing the altar as Lee rose to his feet; shaking but still clutching Time's Keeper. Aitu Xiore applauded his protege.
"I take it you won't be so quick to mouth off next time you suffer an inconvenience?"
Lee spat a mouthful of blood to his feet.
"That was a lesson?"
Aitu Xiore chuckled as Lee raised an eyebrow in suspicion.
"Quite. If it were not, you'd be dead. That said, it is still only half of the truth. It's important that you learn to temper your tongue, as it were. Words have power, kiddo. No one wants to see you talk yourself into a Klein Bottle."
"That can happen, huh?"
"Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the first time... worst part is that the first victim had a point, but said just a little bit too much."
Lee paused for a moment.
"I'm not sure whether to consider your prior actions a courtesy or an offensive..."
His sponsors cackled.
"Then consider it a learning experience in place of either," Aitu Xiore struggled to reign himself in for the first time in aeons. Once he had his fill of laughter, the Paragon of Thresholds put his hand to the horizon, taking hold of something unseen and forcefully tearing it towards the top of the mountain. A ripple in space-time outside of the barrier protruded vertically against the precipice of its peak, with lights phasing through different frequencies and colors in a blur around its borders. Aitu Xiore beckoned Lee toward it.
"We've kept you here long enough. Sybelia is waiting for you on the other side."
Lee began to walk out of the barrier towards the portal, but turned back once to face his benefactors.
"Thank you for your guidance."
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
The red light of a new dawn broke through the canopy of a towering redwood forest from the west, with the chirping of many an exotic avian correspondence reverberating across the leaves and branches; signaling the beginning of a new day. As their song enveloped the towering giants, the cry of a bone-tailed hawk with a wingspan of two-thirds a meter resonated from above the canopy. Taking a dive, it began circling above an outcrop in the expanse, where the canopy did not cover. Four pairs of human-like footsteps imprinted themselves in tandem upon the fallen leaves and foliage, all in the direction of the outcrop; though no figure could be perceived to make them. Not five minutes later, the footsteps all stopped at the beginning of the rock formation. The bone-tailed hawk dove toward where the footsteps had stopped and gripped something out of sight with its talons. A forest elf of two meters height and slim stature in sabre-tooth fur revealed himself and held out his arm, smiling at the creature without the slightest expression of surprise.
"Reice, still as playful as ever," He regarded the avian humorously with a voice like satin as it perched itself on his forearm. "What did you see here?"
Reice the Hawk rotated its head towards the center of the outcrop, where sparks began to fizzle in the air out of nowhere. Three more cloaks were drawn off as a 2.5 meter Lycan, a 1.8 meter human female and a 1.5 meter male half-elf, all wearing the same garments as their leader, relieved their guises and drew their arms before being gestured by the forest elf to stand down.
'He would not have given my position up if it were trouble,' was his thought process. He had raised this hawk from an egg, after finding its mother dead not far from its nest; he had trained it, and it had also taught him a number of things as well. He was certain of his intuition.
Then the fizzling turned to audible tearing as a ripple in space-time ejected something from it at the center of the outcrop and re-sutured itself as the distortions of light ceased. The four advanced upon the ejection, and found a young man in rags bearing bronze-like skin, golden hair, silver eyes and a rugged, tempered complexion spread unconscious on the ground. On his was a single item of value, a pocket watch comprised of precious metals and gems.
The Lycan inhaled from his snout and spoke in a harsh, baritone voice:
"He's alive, has a pulse, just passed out. Is this what Reice was honing in on, Daritz?"
The forest elf turned to his fair-furred compatriot while the hawk cawed at him.
"That would be affirmation to your question, Lexo. Can you get a read on his internals, Vivye? I'd like to know how to handle him, just in case."
The human female, freckles dotting her pale face, brushed her long scarlet hair out of her face. She engaged with a voice that was smoother than satin.
"I'd typically take the Lycan for his worth in a time like this, but I won't refuse you if you want to err on the side of caution." Vivye reached into a leather satchel wrapped on and pulled out a vial of translucent red liquid, sealed with a dropper not much different from a miniature aspirator. Gathering a single drop's worth in the bulb, she applied it to her right eye and blinked. When she covered her left eye, she confirmed.
"No fractures, no signs of trauma, no diseases; there is an abnormality in his skeletal system, but I can't diagnose it nor pinpoint its origin. I don't believe it to be problematic, but..."
Daritz raised his browline in anticipation, few things were able to elude Vivye's right eye when stimulated with Seer Serum. She sighed in defeat.
"It's no matter, he's all clear. I am curious about the only piece he has on him being that wa-."
She began to gaze towards the watch, but ended up clutching her temple as if a migraine was beset on her the very instant she tried to do so with her right eye.
"What the fuck!? Is that a dyson sphere? Why the hell does it feel like I just stared directly into a blue star for five minutes straight?!"
Daritz and Lexo blinked in surprise. She hadn't been able to look at it for more than half a second, but it was that excruciating? Lexo barked at the half-elf.
"Arduen! Nullify the Seer Serum!"
The half-elf scurried over and produced out a transparent liquid from his pocket in the same type of container that Vivye had pulled from her satchel, swiftly but precisely extracting two drops in the bulb and applying them to her eye in three breaths. The pain in Vivye's right eye subsided as she fell to her knees, exasperated. Arduen spoke with a hushed tone.
"To satiate your curiosity; given your reaction, that's either a Mythical-Grade Artifact with an underlain curse against prying eyes, or an Exceptionary Function Actualizer, and the latter is a lot more probable."
The mere mention of that seemed to be followed by a harrowing silence, deafening even the chirping of the other avians until Reice's eyes reacted to the man laying on the ground before them as he began to stir.
"So he's potentially a-?" Lexo began to ask but Daritz hushed him, as he too had seen the man coming to. Each of them took two steps backward, having been unknowingly walking toward him since he first fell out of the portal. Groaning, he slowly and arduously pushed himself up off the surface of the outcrop, and stood up slightly dizzied. As his eyes began to come into focus and adjusted to the world around him, he also noticed he was not alone and blinked in disbelief upon realizing what he was looking at.
"Well, I am *definitely* not back home anymore."