Left, nothing. Right, nothing. Up, nothing. Back, nothing. Nothing was chasing us, or nothing that I could sense.

  Tap, tap, tap… The strides of my guide were all I could hear, and as the time passed, I could see the grimace on his face harden.

  We stopped.

  “Were here.” He said, weary. I quietly dismounted; my feet were wobbly, and my lower back hurt. The fading adrenaline made a chained sickness break loose, and I felt worse than ever before. It almost made me vomit.

  The location was familiar despite my double vision and despite everything.

  “REILYA!!!” I yelled with all my strength. It was stupid and illogical, which made my guide growl.

  “You idiot, can’t you sense it!” He said, taking a defensive stance, ears sharp and limbs distanced.

  “REILYA!!” I called out again, marching forward. It was an unnecessary action, risky, and with little reward, but I felt as if it was my only option. Everything outside burned, my eyes, my skin, my mouth, and yet everything inside was cold and weakening by the minute.

  “Hey!” He blocked my path, growling as he spoke. “Shut it or before you get us both killed!”

  “REILYA!” I screamed, cupping my mouth with my hands. I was dying. But not until I give her the keys to what we have been searching for.

  “R-“ My legs gave out, and so did my lungs. The snow was comforting on the burning skin on my face; it made me close my eyes to rest. I could rest for a minute, but death came quicker than I thought. Its cold embrace was familiarly comforting. Yet my soul didn’t pass.

  It was almost like a dream, getting swallowed by the snow, then ground, getting dragged to the earth as if the ground itself was water. But dreaming was impossible for someone like me. Even in the depths of my psyche, everything was as plain as a stone floor, endlessly flat, and endlessly peaceful. It was warm, like it was bathed by the sun, which was odd since there was no light here.

  “Do you regret it?” A voice soft and reassuring, motherly. But I was born alone.

  “No,” I still answered.

  “There is no need to lie.” Another voice spoke, deep and full of authority. My ‘father’, I would like to imagine, but then again, I reminded myself that they were not real.

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  I breathed and opened my eyes to parents who didn’t exist. Faceless white dolls with their only defining feature was that one was slender, while the other was muscular. Their figures are visible even in total darkness.

  “I don’t regret making that deal,” I said, and sighed. Shivering as air exited using what orifice it could find. In here, I was what I really was; my body was a dozen-eyed mountain of writhing flesh and bones. The question of how bones could become flaccid and hard on command was always curious.

  “Are you sure, dear?” ‘Mother’ asked

  “Regret is something every man has to face.” ‘Father’ added.

  “I don’t regret it,” I repeated, batting them away with a tendril of hard bone. Seeing their bodies ragdoll and skip on the stone plain was mildly entertaining.

  “That's not how you treat people, young man.” They said in unison, unaffected by the fact that their limbs and heads were brokenly bent inward and outward.

  I sighed again. There was no way to get rid of them, crushed, eaten, torn to shreds. They were like an annoying weed; kill one, and another one would sprout to take its place. Even in my own psyche, I could never get peace.

  “Come on, dear, you know, you can’t escape us.”

  “Holding back so much would only crush you, son.”

  I never regret.

  Glooming over one’s failures instead of working to resolve them is a sin. Progress will always lead to inevitable mistakes; running and falling, climbing and losing grip, fighting and blinking at the wrong time. Everything has a chance to fail, but whether that mistake causes us to stop. It is only because of a weak soul, and my soul is anything but weak.

  My body was dying; it was not the first time it failed, and in failure, I see room for improvement.

  ‘Authority of the body. Vanity of the soul. Sanctuary of the mind.’ Phrases I repeated steadily in my mind, letting the very words form on my flesh, runes spread all over, spilling onto the stone floor, forming circles and glyphs. Mimicking the night sky until the floor glowed with a universe of color and systems, whose meaning was known by my flesh but unknown to my mind.

  “By my vanity,” words left my mouth fainter than a whisper, “void authority. Soul reigns over all.”

  A quake, violent and steady, the entire plane shook like a dysfunctional machine. Like ill-fitted cogs, a third of the glyphs cracked and exploded into star dust that hazed the air in black fog.

  “Still holding back.” My ‘parents’ spoke in unison. “There’s no shame in what you are. You can change everything outside, but that doesn't change what you are.”

  They were right, but I ignored them; it was something I already knew. My attention was needed elsewhere.

  A starless night, where the pale light of the moon coated everything in ghostly white, through the trees and in the tall grass. A corpse, a warm body, the taste of its blood, the texture of its smooth and bitter skin, sinew and muscle gliding through my teeth... Memories I remember clearly, memories of the first and last body I stole, a man whose blood was filled with regret and sorrow.

  Crack! Crash…

  The ground rumbled, and the sound of collapsing stone echoed through the fog. Crumbling and transforming in an orchestra of construction, rivers of gravel and boulders flowed up and back down to fog, creating twisted arches of flowing stone.

  “Good job, son. It's perfect.”

  “Not quite close, honey, it’s rather gray.”

  I am neither a scholar nor a practitioner of magic, but by instinct alone, I use it, and the results are always interesting. Close to what I desire but never perfect.