Ess saw a long, dark corridor ahead of him.
At that moment, he couldn't have been concerned at all with what he was. He seemed to glide through the corridor and turn right down another. The exquisite carpeting below him was familiar, but his mind didn't bother to spell out where it had seen this peculiar design before.
After a staggering number of turns, rises and dips, Ess found himself before a plain, innocent-looking, white door.
The door opened for him and he surged through it with a tide of dark mist whose origin he couldn't have bothered learning about.
Blood-curdling screams blasted him from all sides at once. They were loud and chilling, and yet Ess didn't find himself feeling disturbed, even if the screams were his own; they belonged to a younger him, it seemed.
A deep voice then spoke. It was familiar. It was cold and piercing.
"This is to remove all weakness, son. You cannot be weak," it said.
