The Furies are at home in the mirror

[MalfGuy2]

Your vision dances between the jagged outlines of sand and snow.
Piercing, cold architecture - Always a stark contrast to the watercolour blurs you know and love.
But something lays amiss whenever you return to Lore's home.

"The Great Poison."

"Is the weapon still making that racket?"

"Gonna be a while before we can really sleep."

You toss and turn in your personal arbour's leafy bedding. Restless discontent.

The little motes of something or another corrupting Lore keep dancing in the air by his door.

There's this distinct sense of dread,

Like whatever we're about to do next, will change the course of history,

"And define us."

"Define me."

"Move up. Reach out to take it."

You don't have hands, but your mastery over illusions can sometimes make things happen that aren't supposed to--

Like willing a bottle over those disturbing, swirling masses that keep accumulating in front of the door.

"And then, you realize who the real enemy is."

---

---

Given enough mass, the inky, black-and-deep-vermillion tendrils of Mana congeal into something even more unsettling.

It surrounded a pallid orb at the center,

Leylines constantly threatening to tear itself and anything adjacent in the bottle apart.

Bottle included.

"Entropy? Does that have a Magickal attribute..?"

It feels familiar.

Too familiar.

Grotesque, and abhorrent, the curtain stain of failure;

"Moros' Aether. Cast it into the fire."

"We all agree to get rid of this thing, right?"

"Purge the unbeliever."

"Not in MY principality."

"Rend it to whence it came."

You will the bottle to shatter with enough force that the tendrils are separated once more into tiny, fragmented wisps instead.

Just another burning memory,

Searing unwanted frustration where it does not belong.

But now, there remained a problem:

Lore is creating this by merely existing.

"Justice should be served."

"We can't hurt our battle-buddy, but we can't just let this wrongness go either."

"The right thing to do?"

"A Monster, the guilt of the father, the mutilation of the son, the sacrifice of their home..."

You resolve to move out as soon as possible.

There were a point of those shiny pebbles elsewhere, something else binding humanity in togetherness.

The clear opposite of whatever... THAT was.

More 'gold' and 'coins' to be had by trying to ignore him instead.

Wealth could make a better motivator, a better distractor for the interim, but how?..

---

Post-Jokulian Economics

---

You turn to Regalus' brother in the faith,

His baldened head a sunbeam amidst the desert sands-and-metal town.

The little Golem sentries look at you curiously every now and again, unable to comprehend why their fallen sibling's components are pinging back to them in a place...

That they don't belong.

"You see, Kyno, I know you love picking stuff up off the ground."
"But here, in human markets, we can come together to sell some of the useful stuff."
"Even mining shiny rocks out of the ground. People pay a pretty penny sometimes."

A sound method to 'manufacturing' more of the shiny pebble ammunition.

"This should be easy. We have so much time on our hands to fly around..."

"Let's take everything we can. Absorb the good stuff."

Dunsman - Though you insist on calling him,

"Thanks, DunesMan. You're the best."

Hands you the paperwork to own a Final Frontier shopping stall.

The meaning is partially lost on you. Not only because we don't have hands to accept this with, but because you've never bothered shopping stalls before.

"...But I dunno how to use this."

"The shopkeep will know."
"They'll try to passively sell everything you put in here."

DunesMan's hand does a little knocking motion on the wooden stalltop.

At least, you think that's what he's doing. At normal-people-size, that's a little blurry to you.

"Finally. Some of this junk was weighing us down."

You further attend DunesMan's more miscellaneous deeds around the prairie border-city to the south. The opening of a library,

The baptism of another faithful to Father Time,

A random Mestran wedding,

People are having fun.

"But it's always the same."
"Raindrops forming overhead."

Nobody there challenges your right to continue.

Hardly even a regular Magi spar registers.

It passes you by, as does your perception,

Until you are drawn back in.

Back towards the watercolour blurs, the autumnal cities on the horizon,

Back to 'home'.

But within The Hole In The Universe, something is never really all what it seems, especially not now...

Not after you've had a glimpse of The Hole In The Universe's nemesis.

Not with this burning, divine mission, churning away inside you now.

---

It's Me

"[Worry not, Mei'Ria. Let me diagnose our guest.]"

You look upon the Mind-Eater once more - Or, rather, the puppeteered thing that ostensibly couldn't exist.
Ripples sent across the Timestream all around The Hole In The Universe, subtle inclinations.

"[What is your purpose, strange creature?..]"

"A promise."

"Our promise? What promise?"

"I didn't bring us back for no reason."

"Everything is going according to plan."

"Why are you so simple and level-headed all of a sudden?"

"Yeah, aren't you supposed to be all dreamy?"

It matters not,
For you are brought before a hall of mirrors with or without your want,
Entreated to an illusory vivisection of the self. Your perceptions are suddenly completely cut off from all else around you.
You bring your imagined 'hand' to the mirror, as if to try wiping it clean with talons that fail to belong to your monstrous form yet -
Or were they what belonged to the smaller Magical Beasts, the little gremlins?
It's hard to tell when The Mind-Eater is doing what it wants.
The Mirrors are so uniquely enticing. You just can't look away from the horror.
The horror that is not you.

---

"The Long Quiet."

You've grown.

---

There is nothing.

Only cold, primordial darkness.

Your being, your consciousness ferments in it - No larger than a single grain of chlorophyll.

It is safe here. No grand failures, no impersonal malaise encroach you.

Safe and sound in The Long Quiet.

...

An inordinate amount of time passes.

You feel like if you lay here, you might not ever wake up.

...But what's this? Somewhere in the sore, listless *imagination* around you - A sensation!

---

"Tell me. What's waiting for me?"

There is a giant ball, outside of this strange Hole In The Universe. And evil apes. And the evil apes are 'duking it out' on the ball.

You'll end up walking among them, in one way or another. It's basically all just evil apes dukin' it out on the big ball.

"How big is the ball?"

You can't even make out the ball while dukin' it out, it's so unfathomably large.

"How small are the apes?"

Infinitesimally small.

"And what's this 'duking it out' you keep saying?"

Competing for resources, labor, and time? It's just a silly expression you stole from the infinite darkness, from The Long Quiet.

The part of the presentation you want to take home is this: You have to be better and stronger than all the evil apes, or you lose.

"That's sad."

Yes. So sad, it's lasted thousands and thousands of years.

And you drowned in that loss and depressiveness a similarly long time ago.

"What do you mean, drowned?"

---

"We've already won."