Asher looked around at his very familiar surroundings. It was his childhood home—an exact copy of how he remembered it.
"What's going on?" Asher asked himself.
The last thing he remembers is that he was fighting the three origin users, and he jumped into a giant black cloud, and now he was here in his childhood home.
"Hello?" Asher asked out loud, to no response.
However, he then heard a knock on his door.
"Master Asher, are you awake?" a voice said from outside the door.
Asher took a step back in surprise; he knew exactly who this voice belonged to.
"Phoebe?" he asked.
The door opened, and in came a maid with dark red hair and green eyes.
"Oh, good morning, master Asher. Did you sleep well?" she asked Asher.
Asher didn't know what was going on. Suddenly, Phoebe, his childhood caretaker, was in front of him, in his old house.
"Phoebe...it's you?" Asher said it out loud, unable to contain his thoughts.
Phoebe smiled "Of course, master, I always try to meet you first thing in the morning."
"But you..." Asher said. Asher knew Phoebe couldn't be here; after all, she vanished years ago when he was still young, and there was no way she could be in front of him.
When Asher was younger, he didn't get out much due to the nobility being biased against him for having elven heritage in his blood, so the only family he knew was his mother and father, along with his personal maid, Phoebe. However, one day, when he was still a young child, Phoebe vanished without a trace. Despite him asking his parents what happened, he never got an answer from either of them.
"Are you okay, master? You look like you're sweating...do you have a fever?" Phoebe asked Asher as she put her hand on his forehead.
Asher backed away from Phoebe "I'm fine...but you...you shouldn't be here."
Phoebe looked puzzled at her master's words "What do you mean, Master?"
"You...disappeared...years ago; how are you here? And how did I get here?" Asher asked.
"Master, you should lay down. I think your fever is getting to you." Phoebe said.
"NO!" Asher yelled out in a panic. "You shouldn't be here!"
Phoebe then started to become shrouded in darkness.
"Aw Asher...all you had to do was play along, and you would live happily in your head."
Phoebe just spoke, but that wasn't the voice Asher remembered her having. Phoebe's eyes, hair, and skin started to change, and soon Phoebe was replaced by Ophelia.
"YOU BITCH!" Asher yelled, jumping at Ophelia however he passed right through her without issue.
"That's not going to work...I'm nothing more than a image after all." Ophelia said with a smile.
"A image?" Asher asked.
"Think of this as a prison inside your own head, a prison of your own memories that I am currently reading. All your happy ones, sad ones and even the ones you buried deep down. I see them all." Ophelia said.
"So Phoebe she..." Asher said before being interrupted.
"Ah yes...the maid you fell in love with as a child before she mysteriously disappeared." Ophelia said with a smile.
"What happened to her?" Asher asked angerly.
Ophelia didn't respond and instead just smiled before she disappeared.
Soon images started to flash surrounding Asher, haunting images of Phoebe being killed, tortured, and many horrible things started to surround Asher, with Phoebe screaming out "HELP ME"
Asher's cheeks started to become stained with tears with him seeing this, and soon the images didn't stop with just Phoebe. His mother, father, his friends, and even the woman who loved him Sherice all showing similar images, with Asher being left with no choice but to listen to their pleas for help.
"I...I...I..." Asher tried to say but couldn't gather any coherent thoughts. He thought if he closed his eyes, he wouldn't see the horrible images in front of him, but they were seared into his brain.
"STOP IT!" Asher yelled.
"Only you can stop this, Asher." Ophelia said with a smile.
*Clang*
Asher heard a metallic sound hit the floor next to him and saw a dagger in front of him.
*Outside of the shroud*
Alex was standing outside the shroud with Adelia next to him.
"What's going on?" Alex asked.
"Ophelia is using one of her...special traits. Basically, once someone enters her shroud, she can create false memories in their heads, so she fills them with the most horrific memories she can think of and makes them see them nonstop before eventually her victims break."
Alex didn't say anything and instead just observed what Ophelia was doing.
"Her ability is... useful, to say the least." Alex thought to himself.
Adelia then pointed at the shroud and said, "Look, it's dissipating."
Once the shroud vanished, a man huddled in the fetal position, crying and mumbling words that roughly sounded like "Please stop."
Ophelia stood behind him and looked at Alex and Adelia before bowing. "It's done." she said in a cutesy voice, despite committing such a monstrous act and breaking a man entirely.
"Sadly, he didn't take my offer for him to off himself, so now all we have is what used to be a man with nothing but horrors in his mind." Ophelia said.
The man in front of them, who used to be Asher Beckett, was now nothing more than a blubbering mess with drool coming out of his own mouth and mumbling the same words over and over.
"That was...a job well done." Alex said.
Alex knew what she did was overkill; however, he honestly didn't care. He hated Asher so much for what he did to the ghost that he didn't care what he had turned into.
"So...what now?" Alex asked.
"Good question, Adelia. What do we do now? Kill him or leave him to choke on his own spit?" Ophelia asked.
Adelia sighed. "Just kill him; we no longer have any use for him.
Ophelia turned her head toward Alex. "Okay, newbie, you can do it."
Alex sighed, knowing there was no point in trying to fight Ophelia on this, because, in all honesty, she was the only person who had ever actually scared him before.
Alex grabbed a firm hold of his tachi before piercing Asher's chest, right where his heart was.
This caused a massive wave of green energy to explode out of his body, causing Alex, Adelia, and Ophelia to be knocked down from it.
Alex slowly opened his eyes and looked around, noticing he was now in a very white room.
"Oh, not again...." Alex said out loud.
"Well, hello there, Alex." a voice said from the side.
Alex turned his head and saw a man with white hair sitting on a couch with what looked like hot tea in his hand.
"We have some things to talk about."
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