The liquid I was suspended in was thick and faintly luminous, warm as blood and clinging like oil, but strangely, I could breathe this liquid and not choke.
My eyes moved around, and I saw that the vessel was enormous, with curved walls of something like glass rising away on every side, far taller than a man, as if it were built to hold something far larger than me, or maybe something that was meant to grow.
I hung in the center of it, weightless, my white hair drifting around my face, far longer than I remembered, with my limbs loose in the fluid.
I could see, dimly, through the curved wall, shapes beyond, other vessels glowing, in this vast dim space, and there were a lot of them.
Then I noticed that I was not the only one in this vessel. Drifting a few feet from me was a creature that looked like an octopus had been fused with a man. I could see eyes and a nose, but the mouth was filled with long tentacles that almost reached its waist.
The body of the creature was contorted as if it had been twisted by a gigantic hand, and I could see its black blood slowly spreading from it, and drifting towards me... it was then that I saw the attachments, needles, tubes, rods of dark metal and pale bones that pierced the creature, and tracing it with my sight, I saw that the other end of this attachment was me.
This realization seemed to open up the floodgates of misery as I nearly hissed in pain. All over my body, even in little Elric, all these long, thin attachments had pierced into me.
A hundred, sunk through my arms and my chest and my spine and my skull, threaded into me, holding me, feeding me or feeding on me, I could not tell which, and at the crown of my head, where the grey man’s spike had been, where the headache had lived all morning, the thickest of them was driven deepest.
I looked at the dead twisted creature, and despite the horror that I was experiencing in my heart, a part of me was smiling.
The parasite feeding on my mind finally ate more than it could contain, like a mosquito that fed until it burst.
I hung in the jar, pierced and drifting, and I did not know how long I had been there. A morning, a year, a decade? For a while, I did not let myself think, just drift.
The headache was gone, and despite being pulled of holes and tubes, my mind was clear, and I had no idea on this earth where I was or how I had come to be here.
And then two voices spoke in my head, and I think I may have cried a little.
∞
"FINALLY," the Moon Fox screamed, in my sister’s voice, in a fury so vast it shook the bond. "Do you have ANY idea how long I have been screaming at you? You absolute... You let that creep take you, and you did not fight back! I was RIGHT THERE, and you did not use our bond!"
I did not know how to respond to that when the voice of the Hollow Avatar reached me: "One more day, and the Soul Flayer would have gained access to the core of your soul. It is a good thing that you are now a Soul Vessel of the Stone Origin Shell, and you have a bond with a Heavenly Beast, plus your other abilities, and the creature could not account for all these... your resistance was the last straw that broke you from its hold, or it would have emptied you, and your fate would be... difficult."
I frowned, "Difficult in what manner?"
"Hey, don’t change the topic." The bond between the Moon Fox and me flared, "You are not getting away from this so easily."
Thankfully, the Hollow Avatar replied to my question without minding the Moon Fox, "The creature of shadow that took you understands the mechanics of this loop better than us, and it knows that you cannot be killed, else you would gain the advantage. The creature in front of us is a very rare demon called a Soul Flayer. It would not kill you; instead, it would take your soul and place it in the abyss of its core, and you shall dwell in a nightmare forever. Unable to die, and you shall never know what is real or fake until your mind is worn down to nothing, and only your essence remains."
I shuddered in horror, but the Hollow Avatar was not done, and even the Moon Fox went quiet,
"When your essence is left, it would be vomited out, and all your abilities, memories and gifts would be freely accessible... including the loop."
"When I was under, I heard both of your voices," I whispered. "Thank you, Hollow... little critter, thank you."
"Don’t call me little critter." I could hear the poutiness in the fox’s voice, and I smiled, "Get us out of this place, Elric. I am choking inside this jar."
Right... I looked around, then I glanced at my longer hair. "How long have I been inside here?"
The Hollow Avatar replied, "It is hard to judge time inside this place, but from what I could glean from the feeding habit of the Soul Flayer, you must have been here for three months."
I thought the news could not get worse, but I nearly panicked when I heard I had been here for three months. What had happened to the world when I was away? Did the Pale Matron rise? Has the world ended, and am I in the Sovereign’s laboratory being experimented on?
So many questions that I froze in place for a few seconds before I snapped out of it.
Deliberating on what I could not change or understand at this point was useless. I had just survived a fate that was far worse than death, and this meant that I was slowly regaining my footing after I had been crushed by the gigantic foot of the Sovereign.
I needed to leave this jar and find out what had happened. I don’t know if killing the Soul Flayer might have raised an alarm, but I could not remain in this place for long.
Pushing the panic and fear to the back of my mind, I focused on the one thing I could control and called up my status screen.