Lithilyn sat in darkness.

  Part of her was disgusted in what she had witnessed so far.

  It was just a guess, but something told her the three female attendants to every Ooura undergoing their bug swallowing ritual were either all the reward for completing the trial, or perhaps the man got to choose one of them. The better part of her mind quickly dismissed her affrontedness towards such a tradition. She was, after all, more or less a token that her mother was negotiating with and planning to sell for a series of well cataloged concessions from the Enka, in return for her hand in marriage. There was hardly a difference between her and a shipment of raw minerals, when you looked at it that way.

  The majority of her mind, however, was filled with fear.

  The song they played throughout the ritual was as harrowing on the ears as being forced to bend to the whims of these savages was on the morale of her guard. She could feel it in the air, the tension and weaning conviction in her leadership. Her torch bearers had been removed from the chamber. All other light besides had been snuffed out as well, leaving her and her men barely able to make out the silhouettes of the nearest Ooura in front of them. If the Ooura were planning an ambush, this would be a perfect time to execute it. And yet, as time wore on, nothing happened besides the continuing of the ritual. Her eyes adjusted somewhat better as the hour wore on. Her mind never did, though.

  The fear was only getting worse.

  ***

  Banon sat in darkness, though he could see just fine. With every passing moment, his own thoughts threatened to betray him. The mind-bending feeling that something was trying to separate him from himself came in waves, and with each barrage of self-sabotage he endured, reality itself began to bend around him just a little bit more than it had the last time.

  The walls of the chamber were breathing–it was the only way to describe it. The floor appeared to have flowing currents overlaid onto its surface, making him feel like an immobile stone sticking up in a river. The drums the men hammered and the scraping instruments the women played seemed to coincide with the rising and falling in intensity with which he felt these distortions.

  When he looked to Iala for support, the flesh of her face was melting into multicolored liquid that dripped upwards off her face as if gravity was in reverse. He cringed, looked back towards the floor and squinted, and for a time that gave him a kind of mild relief. It wasn’t long, however, before a new sensory intrusion forced him back into the present.

  Someone was breathing.

  Someone angry, hungry and vengeful. It was the strangest thing that Banon could tell all of that just by the subtle differences in the breathing patterns of this individual, but in this elevated state, he could. He slowly forced his gaze to hone in on the sound, though in the pit of his stomach, he already knew. When he met the subtle glimmer that came from elder Tema’s eyes, he knew they were focussed on Banon. The face attached to them, however, was another horror in and of itself. Tema’s face was his own, but exaggerated in every conceivable way. His jaw and brow were set in demonic angles, and every twitch and flare of his nostrils exuding hatred. All at once, Banon became completely convinced what he was staring at was not elder Tema, but an evil spirit making a bad attempt at hiding among the mortals.

  Banon felt his heart speed up, his muscles tightening. He was prepared to fight.

  Until a small yet stern hand brushed against his knee.

  Iala tilted her head at him, eyes inquisitive. “Calm,” she said. “The fight is inside, not out.”

  Banon blinked at her. A small part of him knew she was making sense, but he’d already worked himself up. And as his body sped up, panic filled him as another threat made itself known. His heart rate had gotten fast enough that now he could feel the venom spreading faster than he could handle.

  “Calm,” Iala repeated. “Slow down.”

  The chorus ended with the thundering crash of all of the drummers beating at once, causing Banon to flinch and snarl. A moment later, he shook his head. There was no immediate threat. He’d only barely managed to keep himself from jumping to his feet and lunging for where the offending sound came from, just then. He felt little better than a feral animal. Iala was right. He needed to slow.

  He barely managed to take a sip of water from each of his attendants before the chorus began anew.

  He tried to listen to Iala’s wise words, but even his deepest and most deliberate of breaths felt like he was inhaling a storm.

  The feeling was too intense. He just needed to close his eyes for a moment.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Far more time than a moment passed in the blackness inside his eyelids. He saw purple flashes, bursts of color around him from where he knew the other Ooura closeby him sat, and surging fractal patterns emanating from them that blended together with each other at their fringes. Every shape within each pattern was interlinked with others. Nothing was solitary.

  And it was all too familiar.

  Including the fractal that he felt emanating from within himself. In that one, he could sense much more detail. So, he decided to push further. Banon extended his awareness inwards, finding the pattern not only extended outward, but inward as well. Each surface shape he probed unfolded, branching off into a thousand impossible directions. It all seemed too familiar to be a coincidence. This was the same thing he had seen when his ancestors brought him to the end well in the eye of Kimitrius. This was his own soul he was sensing. Somehow, it was much easier to perceive in detail now than it had been back then when he was wrenched from his body.

  This was also, undoubtedly, the sixth sense he had been noticing building up ever since then. A life sense, he had thought it to be at first. But now he could tell it to be something different. This was his sense of soul. Not only his own, but of every living thing around him. His fellow Oora’s soul’s were the easiest to notice since they resembled his own, but everywhere around him there were more, though less distinct and bright.

  The Pyathen behind him, he sensed as bundles of taught strings. There were tiny, insectoid souls crawling along the walls of the chamber of rites. On the forest floor below him, the mat even had a soul–one lacking in the same brightness and complexity, but a soul nonetheless. He was fairly certain he could even get vague impressions of fish and other water dwelling creatures beneath that in the lake underneath their village.

  When he turned his soul sense towards the Mew tree whose branches cradled the chamber of rites, he was suddenly overwhelmed with brightness. He had to retract his awareness because it was actually painful to look at. But in the small glimpse he had gotten, he saw a colossal pattern branching out in a similar–though much more complex–way to actual tree branches. It extended so far he could swear it was touching both horizons–even though, within his soul-sight, there was none to see. He had also gotten the distinct impression that it was watching him, and perhaps all of them here in the chamber. And there was one more thing, something he was less sure of than his other observations.

  He got the distinct impression of two souls. One, the tree itself. But another… overlaying it? No, that was wrong. Nestled within it might be more apt, but still not entirely correct. They felt almost two parts of the same whole. One ancient and uncaring, one sapient and observing. Their patterns were separate, yet interlinked deeply. Not merely tentatively connecting at the fringes like his own soul with the Ooura surrounding him.

  He hid within his own soul for a time, fearful of glimpsing the Mew tree’s spirit again, and moreso whatever than creature was hiding within it. It was not that it had felt antagonistic towards Banon himself. Both were quite beautiful, despite their intensity. But some things had such majesty that fear was the only appropriate response.

  Now that his focus had turned inwards again, Banon resolved to explore as much of his own soul as he could. He found that, though he could sense it was deep, maybe even boundless, he was hardly able to navigate the shallows without getting lost in it. His frustration grew and grew, until some time later he noticed something restless and resentful making itself known. Banon retracted back to the surface level only to see a dark presence looming over his own soul.

  It shifted, flickering menacingly upon his notice. The monster hovering over his soul was blacker than the surrounding void, yet all too visible, pronged with fangs and arachnid arms springing totally at random. Its spider-like arms were poking and scraping at his soul–which, from this higher level perspective, appearing as an armored orb wreathed in fire, as if some automatic defense had been activated by the black entity’s presence.

  This arachnid being was not another soul, for it had no pattern nor depth. Once he realized that, he recognized it immediately. It was his own ambition, given form, fiber, purpose, being, and that black mass was what it looked like. It was mocking him for being unsatisfied, for needing to have figured it all out on his own rather than accepting that real change takes time, and most of all for not trusting in those around him to be anything more than useful tools for his ends.

  But how could that be? Every ambition he had ever had had been selfless, for all his people. A twinge of pain came from the monster as it scraped deeper, telling him he was wrong. He got the impression it would refuse to leave until he admitted it so. Banon meditated on that, desperate to justify himself and prove this presence to be merely a weakness that he only needed to fight against harder. But as he felt himself stray further from the inevitable truth, the pain worsened. Eventually, he relented, trying to accept the point tentatively at first.

  That did not work either.

  It was only when he opened up, and in honesty admitted that his ambition was not only a weakness, but his greatest weakness, that the entity of which it was made from relented on him and disappeared. It did not leave him without one last sentiment, however.

  It is also your greatest strength.

  He had expected admitting weakness in such a complete and open way to cause even worse pain, but he only felt liberated.

  Colors that he felt as much as vibrations as he actually saw them began to appear, swimming at first around the edges of his black void. They eventually descended to an impossibly bright point, and then that point began to expand again until his usual awareness of his flesh and blood body returned to him. As he creaked open his eyes and took in the room again. He was still sitting, not sprawled out on the floor sleeping, which seemed impossible. He was sure he had spent hours being unconscious in that place where his soul was visible, though, weirdly, he could no longer quite picture that place any longer. The fractals, he remembered in a sense still, but their shapes were a blurred mass of color in his memory now.

  Banon blinked until it became bearable for him to take in the room around him once again, now devoid of bright, fractal souls, but instead populated by the ordinary bodies they belonged to.

  When he glanced to the side, his attendants looked mildly concerned, but only as much as if they had seen him nod off for minutes, not for hours like had felt to him to have passed.

  Bit of an update:

  You guys were right. I tried to integrate some of my newer, higher fantasy ideas into the story and it did not work. Wasted a good bit of effort and time planning out how to integrate a progression magic system into a story that didn’t need it. Wrote a chapter and several scenes for future ones that are now entirely worthless.

  In the aggregate, though, I think it’s for the best, because I feel better than I have in months about the direction I want to go with this story. The higher fantasy bits up to this point like the overt blessings from kimitrius, Ugtang magically understanding Banon instead of Banon using his understanding of Yubuou language to communicate, over the top visions, etc, all feels cheap and out of touch with the rest of this story. This story is about a dwindling empire mired in tradition that has come to hurt it more than help it, and an ambitious young man with a mind for ingenuity in spite of that. The solutions to problems should reflect that, rather than magic just saving the day. All I was doing was overcomplicating and over expanding the scope with this stuff which ended up taking the attention away from the story elements I set up in the early chapters. Same with some elements of this chapter and the entire next chapter (which I had to axe) as it was just wayyyy overcomplicating the scope with high fantasy magic systems.

  That said, I will not be removing any sense of magic and wonder, just retconning it (at a later date, after regaining control of the current story) into a far more subtler touch, to the point where most of the time it is left up to the interpretation of the reader whether the mystic elements are literal, figurative, or simply a figment of the characters imagination (which is what I originally set out to do before I got ahead of myself and lost sight of my story’s individuality due to binging too much highly magic-focussed progression fantasy lol).

  So, for now, proceed with your head cannon as if none of the overtly magicy wagicy stuff happened, and eventually, once I have the time, I will go back undertake the task of replacing each instance of it with ingenuity and wit instead. Anyway, that’s all for now. By this point you probably expect blunder updates like this every third chapter, but in my naivety, I do almost believe this might be the last one.