Arcen opened his eyes.
Soft strands of hair brushed over his eyelids.
His mother’s face filled everything that he could see. He felt small—or rather, the world felt so much bigger because he was in bed, cuddling with her.
He was definitely a toddler, but he didn’t really feel like a toddler. He was seeing this through his own eyes from a long time ago.
He tried to move himself, but he quickly found out that he wasn’t in control of anything. He was just here to watch.
This was a memory from really far back—almost two decades ago. He couldn’t even remember being alive at this point in time, let alone ever having memories with this much detail.
Kysa lay next to him—fast asleep with her mouth open—covered only with a yellow bedsheet, looking like a Renaissance painting of a peeled banana. She would’ve been about nine or ten here. Kylan wasn’t born yet, or he would’ve been there.
He brought his eyes back to his mother, who was two decades younger than what he remembered, about as young as present day Kysa. She had her arm pinning him and his sister in place. He felt sleepy and comfortable like he’d never felt since.
Each blink took longer and longer than the last, but he kept staring at his mother in a way that he’d forgotten since. He felt safe in this moment, like he belonged there and everything was alright in the world.
Seeing this now almost two decades later, it was far worse than being stabbed to death.
In the eight years since Mayday, Arcen did everything to blur his mother’s face back to a stranger. He buried the grief in work, whiskey and a shitty, busy life.
This memory hurt him in ways he never imagined. An annoying urge to cry grew at his throat, but it was just in his mind. He couldn’t cry, because in this slice of time, he didn’t have a reason to cry.
As he tried to reign his mind back to the harsh reality, a shadow fell over the bed as if someone stood in front of the window. He knew this was strange, even as a toddler. There was someone else in the room.
Slowly, he felt himself come alive. He started feeling his limbs, and he started hearing his own thoughts in his head.
Woah! What’s happening!
He lifted his head above his mother’s soft hair. A black shape stood at the window, casting a huge shadow, as large as the wall.
AE DU NUR?
A noise that only he could hear erupted all around him. He felt it vibrate his entire body, maybe even the world itself.
The black figure moved as he remained frozen in fear and confusion. He had never seen anything like this before. This was a monster—one that nobody ever told him about.
EKIN!
The world flickered. He saw himself through the eyes of the monster. He was so small and vulnerable. His lips were quivering with fear, and he was about to burst into tears.
Arcen opened his eyes to a familiar sight, one that he had never expected to see again.
It was his old room in the Seattle apartment that he grew up in. His ceiling had fourteen stars and three clouds. He used to stare at them whenever he went to sleep and whenever he woke up.
He looked at his arms. They were thin and smaller. His right hand was bandaged at the elbow, and it hurt whenever he moved it. He had vague memories of falling down a staircase on a rainy day. He was in fifth or sixth grade when it happened.
After crawling out of bed, Arcen gazed at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth. He couldn’t tell exactly how old he was just yet.
The boy in the mirror looked above nine, below twelve. He’d almost forgotten what he used to look like back then.
He could’ve been any other boy with his black hair and brown eyes. He was different from his brother, sister and even his mother. They all had blonde hair and green eyes.
Seeing himself now, he remembered how he used to feel about that back then. His mother had nothing to tell him about it.
She shut down any discussion about the topic on the spot until they learned not to speak a word about it—not even in their worst fights. Calling him adopted or anything like that was as taboo as wishing death on him.
He finished brushing his teeth and dragged his feet to the living room. It was chaos as usual, clothes on chairs, clothes on couches, broom on the floor and broken curtains.
He saw all the details that he forgot in eight years, like how it felt to be there, how it smelled. This entire apartment building fell apart six months after Mayday.
Too many trees, too many dead people.
In this slice of time, it was preserved just as he wanted to remember it. A still from an old movie smeared with time. He read a big piece of paper taped on the refrigerator when he went to grab the milk.
‘Happy Birthday, Arcie! I got a work thing. I’m so sorry. I’ll be back by nine. We’ll have a big party. I love you so much!’
He was clueless which birthday it was, but he knew this memory. This was around the time he gave up on birthdays. The gifts were getting boring, and the parties were getting sad. As the middle child, he was truly stuck in the middle.
Kysa had a lot of fun on her birthdays. She was old enough to throw herself parties with other fun people.
Kylan was little enough to be super excited about life in general, regardless if it was his birthday or not.
He was alone in the living room with a milk carton and a note from his mother. It was ten in the morning. Kylan would be in preschool. Kysa would probably be out skipping school. He sighed, went over to the counter and made himself some cereal.
The memory suddenly felt different. He felt someone in the living room. He heard them breathing, and he felt their weight shifting on the wooden floorboards.
Peeking carefully around a corner, he saw a tar black figure hunched in front of the refrigerator.
It was so big that if it stood up, the head would have to punch through the ceiling. It had biceps the size of couch cushions.
This demon could kill him with a flick of a finger.
Suddenly, he felt himself coming alive in his body. He could move his own limbs. He could feel the pain in his right arm. He slowly transitioned from an observer back into himself.
What the hell is happening!
His fingers trembled, and he dropped the bowl, scattering cereal all over the floor.
“Eeh!” he screamed, his young heart about to burst through his ears. He was afraid, like the little boy that he was.
The tar black figure turned. It had horns and the face of an ape. It had the note from his mother clutched in its huge hand.
AE DU NUR?
It spoke, but the voice came from all around him. He felt each syllable reverberate in his bones. Frozen in fear, he couldn’t move an inch.
EKIN!
The world flickered around him. He saw himself through the demon’s eyes. Scared out of his wits, clinging onto the counter for dear life.
Arcen opened his eyes.
He’d fallen asleep on the dining table. Two plasters were neatly pasted on his right hand over the knuckles and another one on the right cheekbone. There was an eighth-grade textbook on the table.
His limbs felt the right size for that age.
“Arcie, does it hurt bad?” Kylan asked, whispering as he peeked in, leaning heavily on the table. He was about seven at this time, around two years before Arcen started to find him annoying.
“Yeah, yeah, it hurts, but it’s alright, Kye,” he said, hiding his hand.
His brother had a weird obsession with other people’s wounds and how much they hurt. In trying to be helpful, he had already put two more plasters on Arcen’s other hand, on two random scratches.
Kysa walked in, hurrying towards the refrigerator. “Ah, look who’s awake,” she said angrily. “Mom’s got a call from the school, you idiot!” She tapped her phone, which she always had in her hands. “What happened? She fucking yelled at me too, what the hell did I even do?”
“Don’t swear, guys!” Kylan said meekly.
“Go to your room then!” Kysa glared at him. “Don’t you see? grown-ups are talking,” she snapped at him.
Kylan instantly got tears in his eyes. It was always very easy to make him cry.
“Hey, don’t you yell at him! He didn’t do anything,” Arcen said, letting his brother hide behind him. He sensed a bitter fight coming, and he had words that he wanted to use against his sister that he didn’t want his brother to hear. “You go to your room,” he said, gently pushing him away.
“I’m gonna tell Mom you guys are fighting and you’re mean to me!” Kylan yelled, sobbing as he disappeared into his room.
A mighty door slam echoed around the house.
“What exactly happened to you?” Kysa asked, narrowing her eyes at his plasters, completely ignoring Kylan’s door slam as if it didn’t happen.
“This happened. You’re looking at what happened,” Arcen said, pointing at his face and fingers. “If Mom yelled at you for it, you deal with Mom. Not at everyone else.”
Kysa being popular was a stain on his life. She was the stuff of legend in the same school that he was heartlessly enrolled in.
In eighth grade, it was two years since she graduated, but the curse followed him still because she never stopped being popular. She had just climbed up a whole another level of fame as a freshman in college. Her life had been set on this path since she posted the first photo of herself on the internet as a teenager.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
A lot of boys at his school kept bothering Arcen for her number, to get her to accept friend requests on social medias or to straight up make her reply to their messages.
Over the years, he ended up becoming the front desk clerk to the hot cake everyone wanted a piece of. It only got worse, being the nerd that he was.
He didn’t have enough friends to deter the bullies. He wasn’t a pushover either, and he kept getting into fights whenever some loudmouth started blabbering about his family.
“Call Mom and just tell her that I talked to you about it,” Kysa said bitterly. She wanted to get it over with just to say that she did what she could.
“Fuck off,” he said, uninterested in helping her in any way.
Kysa frowned angrily as she came up to him. “You do it, or I’ll beat you myself!”
“Oh please, we both know you can’t do shit without your boyfriends. Now get out of my face!” He stood up, having spent enough time in public. He wanted to retreat into his room.
As he turned, he felt her fingers bite into his shoulder.
“I’m the only reason you even have any friends! Asshole!” She said, making every word count. She always knew exactly which buttons to press.
“What friends, bitch?!” He turned around, readying his hand for the hardest roundhouse slap in the world.
As his hand swung towards her, he felt himself spread across his own body. He saw something that wasn’t part of this memory. The hand on his shoulder was black, and it was as large as his face.
What the fuck!
There was a tar black figure—ten feet tall—looking down at him with big red eyes. It had horns and muscles in places he’d never thought muscles could be.
Arcen felt weak at the knees.
AE DU NUR?
The demon spoke the words with its mouth, but the voice came from the world itself. The ground shook, and the lights dimmed. Reality flickered around him, cracks running through it like shattering glass.
EKIN!
The world fell apart beneath his feet. For a split second, he saw himself through the demon’s eyes—a thirteen-year-old boy about to scream his lungs out like a little girl.
Arcen opened his eyes.
He was in a dull, small room with off white walls. His hands came into view as he rubbed his eyes. His skin was purple. He felt like he woke up underwater. Sounds were muffled in his ears, and everything looked hazy in his eyes.
He knew this place all too well. This was post Mayday—a recent memory unlike the others. He’d barely begun to forget it.
Nothing happened in this memory. He was there, half awake, staring at nothing. At some point, he felt himself crawling back into his body.
No! Get me out!
His first thought was escape. He didn’t want anything to do with this place, even in a memory. He closed his eyes, and he refused to open them.
AE DU NUR?
He ignored all the voices. He plugged his ears with his fingers. It wasn’t enough to shut out the world, but he did it anyway.
EKIN!
Suddenly, he saw himself from above. Curled up on a small bed, in a small room with an iron door and a toilet. A Mayday mutant, new to being an octopus man. Alone in a world afraid of what he could become.
┌──════════──???──════════──┐
Skip
──────────────────────────
ERROR 41 (4)
Command Failed!
Device Error 41:
Immersion Module 3/17 Corrupted Data
└──════════──???──════════──┘
┌──═════════──???──═════════──┐
HELVITER INDUSTRIES
︾
──────────────────────────
?Contract Activation Successful?
──────────────────────────
Contract: Glimpses of the Past
Cost: $768,500
Remaining Daily Quota: $34,500
└──═════════──???──═════════──┘
Arcen flew off the chair when he emerged from the dive. He felt drunk almost immediately. It wasn’t two shots drunk, he was twelve shots in, near non-verbal sort of drunk.
Something was rising from the depths of his stomach, it felt like his dinner crawling its way out, but he knew it wasn’t. It was just a weird burn crawling up the inner walls of his esophagus. Black tendrils grew on his visor like tree roots, bursting from the port at the back of his helmet.
Some of the tendrils had already pierced into the nape of his neck. Searing pain thundered through his body and he felt them move under his skin, probing his flesh from within, growing in the spaces between his bones.
As the tendrils reached his gut, he felt it grow heavier, as if he swallowed something too big to digest. He tried to throw up but only managed to spit inside his hazmat helmet.
Finally gaining control over his own mouth, he started yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Help!”
AE-O!
He tried to grab anything to stand again. The world flickered red as his voice echoed in a different octave with a delay.
The scientists rushed to freeze the corpse of Norm Lorraine. He managed to grab one of them by the leg as cold clouds of liquid nitrogen erupted above him.
The leg that he grabbed crumbled like a butter stick in his hand. It felt like the man had no bones and was simply made of jelly.
He kept trying to get back on his feet using the man’s body for support, but every limb he grabbed collapsed immediately. They both fell screaming, and the nitrogen tank popped like a balloon when Arcen’s hand fell on it.
“What!”
WHA?
He managed to grab something more solid in his panic—the table his analyzer machine was mounted on. It felt solid for a second, but it fell apart like a cardboard box when he put his weight on it.
“What the fuck is going on?!”
WHA... DUH... GO-IN... OOO!
The world glitched red for longer the longer he spoke. The echo grew louder and more powerful.
As he tried to stabilize himself on his two feet, his ears hummed to a deafening peak. Gold veins burst from the corners of his eyes toward the center.
╭╰︶?? ERITHERIA ??︶╯╮
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯YOU ARE INTERESTING╰︶
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭───────────────────╮
︶╯ ATTENTION ╰︶
????
YOU HAVE SUCESSFULLY
FUSED YOUR SOUL WITH
THE NASCENT MERONOLITH
KING [NOM LOR EKIN]
??
FROM THIS MOMENT
ONWARDS YOU WILL BE
CATEGORIZED AS A
SINGLE TOWER ENTITY
??
YOU HAVE SUCESSFULLY
GAINED MY UNDIVIDED
ATTENTION
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
Fused?! What the hell is this!
FUSE WHA… DUH… HAE… IS… DI…
He tried to blink the gold threads out of his eyes, they were getting in the way. No one around him paid him any attention. They were all busy hosing the egg with liquid nitrogen.
Blood pounding in his ears, he panicked even further. Something had gone wrong, and he was surely dying.
What is happening to me!
WHA I… HA…
Gold veins burst in his eyes yet again. This time, showing him exactly what was happening to him.
╭╰︶?? ERITHERIA ??︶╯╮
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯NAME╰︶
????
NAMELESS
??
NOM LOR EKIN
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯TITLE╰︶
????
NO TITLE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯CLASSIFICATION╰︶
????
INITIATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ ATTRIBUTES ╰︶
????
LOVE [5]
??
HATE [8]
??
TRUTH [9]
??
DECEPTION [8]
??
ORDER [7]
??
CHAOS [6]
??
HOPE [5]
??
DESPAIR [9]
??
CREATION [6]
??
DESTRUCTION [2]
??
LIGHT [5]
??
DARKNESS [8]
??
LIFE [7]
??
DEATH [6]
??
FUTURE [16]
??
PAST [3]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯SKILLS╰︶
????
PREDICT [1]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯MAIN CONTRACTS╰︶
????
GREATER DAYLIGHT [1]
??
SCORCHING SUN [4]
??
STORM OF SCYTHE [2]
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯SUBCONTRACTS╰︶
????
NO SUBCONTRACTS
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯TRAITS╰︶
????
SWALLOW
??
SUFFERENCE
??
EMBODIMENT
??
WEIGHT
??
REGENERATE
??
COMMAND
??
EXTRACT
??
MULTIVARIATE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯DOMAINS╰︶
????
NO DOMAINS
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯ITEMS╰︶
????
NO ITEMS
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯QUESTS╰︶
????
EARN YOUR NAME
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
︶╯TRIBES╰︶
????
MERONOLITH HIVE
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
?╭─ GOLD ─╮?
╰ 0 ╯
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
╭────────────────────╮
?╭─ AURA ─╮?
╰ 10,334,892 ╯
╰─────────╮╭────────╯
Blinking through tears, he stared at it with his mouth open. Things had definitely changed. He had contracts, and new traits. Somehow, those were the least concerning thing that he saw.
His tribe was Meronolith Hive and he had ten million of whatever Aura was supposed to be. His heart beat fast enough to hurt as if he got stabbed with a screwdriver.
Just in time, Doctor Bourbon appeared out of nowhere.
Arcen grabbed the man’s suit with both hands, straining all his strength into his legs to stand up. Luckily, the man didn’t collapse at his touch this time.
Their heads bounced off each other and their visors cracked. His visor was bloodied, but he felt just fine. He was back on his feet again.
“I’m out of here!”
AI... OU... O... ‘IER!
He yelled at anyone who was listening. Two people lay on the floor while three were busy freezing the egg. No one paid him any attention.
“I’m gonna throw up!”
AI-NA... ‘RO... O-P!
He couldn’t see his way out properly through the cracked helmet. He ripped the cracked visor off his face and located the exit and ran outside.
He felt much better during his run. Solid things started feeling like solid things again. The door of the integrity room shuddered when he bounced into it, but it didn’t crumble like the table.
He found Jenna and Torga waiting for him. They were horrified when he burst out in a cloud of cold vapor.
“Excuse me!”
E... SSS... KOO... ME!
He yelled, stumbling towards them.
“Mr. Henwick! Calm down!” Torga grabbed his arm.
He couldn’t calm down. That wasn’t an option.
“Open the door, I wanna throw up!”
OPEN DUH DOOR... AY WANNA ‘RO U-P!
He held his bloated stomach with both his hands as both Torga and Jenna ran to open the door in a hurry.
He threw up as soon as he went outside, flushing the contents of his entire stomach. The crawling in his gut still remained. Jenna gave him a water bottle, and he almost ate it when he couldn’t unscrew the lid with his shaky fingers.
He turned to her, face drenched in cold water, trembling from head to toe.
“Mr. Henwick, I’m calling the medical team right away! Please don’t worry!” Torga shoved his phone in his ear and ran off towards the camp entrance.
Jenna stayed frozen, staring at him wide-eyed.
“My pills! Hurry, quick! Where’s my wallet?”
MY... FILLS! HURRY, QUICK! WEY’S MY WALLE?
The world flashed red, and she promptly handed him his wallet. His fingers were trembling, and he couldn’t see clearly. He dropped all its contents on a mossy patch of ground—cards, bills, coins and...pills.
He found a card of pills and started chewing on it like it was jerky. They didn’t seem to help in any way. Painkillers never worked immediately.
He found a smaller packet of four pills—translucent ones with a glowing red droplet in the middle. He ripped it open with his teeth and sucked it all in. He felt some pointy edges on his tongue. They were differently shaped from the white discs that he chomped on earlier.
These pills were heart-shaped.
He couldn’t comprehend what happened, but as soon as he crunched them between his teeth, everything was alright in the world.
Whoa, what the?!
WOOA WHA?
