The battle was over, and somehow I was sitting next to Dragan, slumped over, my skin slowly getting away from me as more and more depressive thoughts took over.
I was in shock.
Sybil had broken the news with such unprecedented hesitation I couldn't wonder why, except to blame myself.
After the battle, after I walked over to the crystal, my mind filled with Dragan almost the instant I had a moment to include him in my thoughts, which was most if not all of the time.
I tapped the glass, I tried to melt it, but Sybil had said it was made of a material called stasis, when in-crusted in a crystal, it froze the person, pulling the body down to where the heart beats only faintly, and in the background.
I've already seen his thoughts, he was out of time, out of space, stuck inside his head, unable to rationalize what was happening to him, before he died, he had thought about me and prevented me from going beyond the far reaches of his primordial consciousness.
I mean he left a soft essence of himself, a fragment of his personality in this mortal realm, the rest of him, it was gone, back into the washing machine we call the universe.
It was like calling into an abyss, and just hearing yourself echo.
It was different from the void, I could sense some type of light magic at work, cleaning everything of impurity.
By Sybil's standards Dragan was deceased.
She made it known only after watching me miserably cry my eyes out over him, pathetic of me.
She threw a UI screen in front of me, disclosing the information, not interfering with words.
"So what were my options here," I finally said out loud.
"I can't download some type of grievance program if that would help?"
"No thank you," I said.
She grimaced with her voice.
My skin color was changing to some type of putrid green, from my usual harmonious blue.
Sybil started explaining that realistically, there were only 2 things I could do here.
Then something magical happened, a sun started to shine through the horizon of this void, a new beginning.
Now that this void was clear of any impurity, mods had explained this was sort of a pocket dimension all to myself. Dragan could stay here, and Sybil could mark the location, allowing me to teleport inside whenever I wished to do so. She would give me the skill as her condolences.
Or I could consume Dragan, this last part was quite a bit of a shocker for me, but I listened anyway, she explained that transporting matter in and out of the crystal was something she could do, but once outside, time would move as normal, and as such his body would decompose.
This is great and all if I wanted to hold a funeral.
But she said that it would be better to teleport it inside of my body, thus I would be able to read his matter down to the size of his DNA. Then she logged it in some kind of archive inside my memory, sealed it, and transformed it into something she called a summon.
My body would ten contort and create itself in the shape of Dragan, his voice would even become mine.
I felt incredibly bad about eating his body, but it wouldn't be like that, I wouldn't be physically ingesting it, only decomposing it, until my cells would become his.
I would be a perfect copy of him.
That fragment of his personality would become mine, that copy of Dragan lost in his mind inside of the crystal, it would be mine.
I opted for this option.
With little to no command of me, Sybil did something by herself. She teleported his body outside and controlled my body, from my sides a bubble formed, and the green muck just sort of hung from the side.
This is the only way to free him, leaving him inside that brain until dead does his spirit good, it didn't feel right, not with everything that had happened. I wanted to keep him safe, I wanted to keep him by my side, and I wanted to be him.
The bubble grew big enough too where Dragan could fit inside, and with little but a wave of a wand Dragan shinned with a lot of light inside the crystal and then he was inside of me just like that.
It didn't taste like anything at first, until little by little his skin started dissolving inside of my slime, piece by piece he disintegrated into light, and memories of him started flowing into me, the good times we went through, the bad times as well. But in the end, all I could feel for him was love.
So I ate him, I consumed him until there was nothing but his soul. Then I heard his voice.
"Little one is that you?!"
"Dragan?!" I said confused.
"I remember, I remember everything, I do; I accept, I want to stay with you, this is the only way, you've made the right choice, now our contract is bond of the soul, and I'll stay with you until the bitter end, till death do us part, I will be with you and you can be me, I love you little one. Remember this is not goodbye, but see you soon!"
With that, his childhood memories flooded into me, and his personality as well.
I regained my human form, and even though I felt sad, I looked at the crystal. There he was, gone, just like that.
In the end, even he had comforted me.