Chapter 106: Dream’s Grave
Inside the monochrome library, Charlotte was browsing through the countless books of the library.
"Miss Mashhith" manifested behind her, speaking soundless words to catch her attention.
"Oh? How weak.", she chuckled, pulling out a book titled 'King in Yellow', "Breaking from something like that, it seem like she has nothing..."
"Well, unfortunate, but a game over is a game over."
With a second thought, Charlotte shelved the book back to its place.
=0=0=
The faceless demons didn't devour her, they didn't have mouths in the first place.
They simply lifted her. The mirror world dissolved around them, reflections shattering into fragments of light.
Then darkness.
Then... something else.
Lea hit solid ground with a dull thud. The demons retreated without a sound, fading back into whatever void they'd come from.
She lay there for a long time. Hours? Days? Time felt meaningless here.
Eventually, the absence of pain forced her to move.
No hunger pangs, thirst, or exhaustion.
Just... emptiness.
Lea pushed herself up slowly, expecting the death from starvation that should have claimed her by now. But her body felt neither weak nor strong. Just... present.
She raised her hands.
And froze.
Her hands were translucent.
Not invisible, but she could see through her palms to the strange gray ground beneath. Her golden skin had taken on an ethereal quality, as if she existed only partially in this space.
"What...?", her voice came out hollow, echoing strangely.
Lea looked around properly for the first time.
She sat in a vast wilderness that defeated description not through strangeness but through the specific wrongness of almost-familiar things. The ground was neither stone nor soil but something between, a gray expanse that shifted subtly at the edge of her vision whenever she was not looking directly at it. She learned quickly not to try to catch it.
It didn't want to be caught. Strange crystalline formations jutted from the earth at irregular intervals, shapes that should have had names but didn't, pulsing with faint sickly light that illuminated nothing around them.
And in the distance, things were moving.
Grotesque shapes lumbered across the landscape. Some crawled on too many limbs, dragging themselves forward with a determination that was worse than if they had been running. Others floated, unhurried, their forms leaving no shadow beneath them despite the ambient light that came from nowhere and everywhere. One was nothing but a mass of writhing appendages surrounding a central mouth that screamed silently, the shape of the scream clear in its body, the sound of it simply not arriving.
A cry tore across the wilderness. Something between a howl and a sob, deeply wrong to hear, the kind of sound that pressed against the inside of the skull and asked to be remembered.
Lea activated her mind-reading instinctively, reaching out the way she had ten thousand times before. Surface thoughts crashed into her mind like water through a broken door.
'Hungry... hungry... can't remember... what was I... please... someone...'
She recoiled, but the thoughts kept coming from every direction.
'Where am I... need to find... what did I lose... pain... only pain remains...'
These things were thinking. Not with animal intelligence, not with the simple hot pulse of a predator tracking prey, but with something disturbingly close to human consciousness. Aware enough to know they had lost something and not aware enough to know what.
"No...", Lea whispered, understanding dawning with horror.
These weren't monsters.
They were people. Or what remained of people. Humans twisted into grotesque forms by whatever this place did to the ones it kept, their minds broken apart but still present enough to suffer, still reaching toward something they could not name.
Lea forced herself to stand. Her legs held, barely, and she turned slowly to take in the full scope of what surrounded her.
And there, dominating the horizon, was the tree.
Massive. Incomprehensible in the way that truly large things become incomprehensible, past the point where scale communicates itself and into something that the mind simply refused to process all at once. A gigantic translucent crimson tree that stretched beyond sight, its trunk so wide it could have housed entire cities inside it, an architecture of wood and red light that should not have been able to exist and existed anyway with complete indifference to that fact.
But only the trunk was visible. No roots or canopy. Just an endless column of red that pierced upward into nothing, because there was no sky here. Lea looked up and saw only a vast featureless gray void stretching in every direction, the same above as below, and the tree simply vanished into it, swallowed without ceremony.
Light existed here despite having no source. Not emanating from the tree, not coming from the crystal formations, not cast by anything she could identify. The space itself produced it, a dim ambient illumination that revealed everything with perfect clarity while somehow making nothing feel real.
"This isn't...", Lea's voice cracked, "This isn't my world."
A wet, gurgling sound came from nearby.
Lea spun to see one of the grotesque shapes approaching, a mass of flesh vaguely humanoid in structure, covered in weeping sores that leaked something black. It had no face, just a depression where features should be.
"Stay back!", Lea summoned her Cursed Constructs on instinct.
Yet nothing happened.
Her powers flickered weakly, barely manifesting before dissolving. Her translucent form couldn't support the full weight of her abilities here, couldn't anchor them. Whatever she was in this place, it was not enough to hold what she had built.
The flesh-thing stopped a few meters away, its body heaving with labored breathing.
Then it spoke.
The voice was agony given sound; wet, broken, barely comprehensible.
"New... comer..."
Lea's hand went to where her blade should be. She found nothing, "What is this place?"
"Dream's... Grave...", the thing wheezed, each word clearly causing pain, "Where... Dreamers... come..."
"Dreamers?", the word felt significant in a way Lea could not explain, like touching a bruise in the dark and knowing it was important to remember how it got there.
"Fourth... Step...", the creature's formless body quivered, "Those who... seek... Law of... Unconscious..."
The words hit her like a physical blow.
Fourth Step for the Law of Unconscious. That was her. That had always been her, since the moment she had completed the ritual and reached toward that particular cosmic law and let it mark her, let it write itself somewhere inside the structure of what she was.
"The moment... you completed... ritual..." the flesh-thing gurgled, "You were... marked... Noticed..."
Lea caught on quickly. She remembered the hooded demon trying to touch her in the ritual space, the faceless things in the mirror world, the way they had always been there at the edge of things, patient, waiting for a moment of weakness she could not afford to give them.
"The God of Order...", Lea whispered, "They intervened. Saved me from them."
She remembered running away from those monsters before... that masked jester saved her from their touch back then. But not now.
"Temporary...", the creature wheezed, "Only... temporary... All Dreamers... marked... Eventually... demons come... Drag us... here..."
"All who... take this Path of Divinity...", it continued, "Fourth Step... risks this... Taken by... faceless... Trapped... Forever..."
Lea's eyes widened. She could feel the understanding arriving, each piece of it worse than the last.
"You're saying everyone who completes Fourth Step gets marked. That we're all at risk of ending up here."
"Yes...", the flesh-thing managed, "All... eventually... dragged here..."
The faceless demons had been hunting her since the moment she completed her Fourth Step. Since she first touched the Law of Unconscious and became a Dreamer. The Shapeless Comedy's intervention had only delayed the inevitable, bought her time she had spent being tortured in Velcross Mansion, bought her time she had spent being broken down piece by piece until there was nothing left that could keep the demons out.
When the Star God had finally finished with her, when her mind had been shattered and scattered and left without the strength to hold its own borders, the demons had walked through what remained.
"Trapped..." the creature said. "Between... Mind... and Soul... Not alive... not dead... Just... here... Forever..."
It began to lumber away, leaving Lea alone with the shape of that word. Forever. Carrying it with it as it went, as if it no longer needed to hear it said.
The Fourth Step paths of Divinity had seemed like the easier road. No need to kill millions the way Charlotte's ritual paths demanded. No rivers of blood, no mountains of corpses, just rituals and chanted titles and entry into a Divine Domain. Clean, almost. Civilized, as these things went.
But this was the hidden cost.
The risk didn't end with the ritual. The risk followed you forever, a shadow stitched to the bottom of your foot, patient and unhurried. The moment you touched a Cosmic Law, you were marked. And if you became vulnerable enough, broken enough, left without the strength to keep the doors of yourself closed...
The faceless would come. They would always come. And they would drag you here to rot in the space between Mind and Soul, between consciousness and existence, in a place where time meant nothing and the light had no source and the people wore the shapes of monsters because the shapes of monsters were all that was left of them.
Lea looked at her translucent hands.
She looked at the grotesque shapes moving across the gray expanse, the things that had once been people, that had once completed rituals and chanted titles and believed they were building toward something.
She looked at the crimson tree rising into nothing.
"No," she said quietly.
Then louder.
"NO."
Her Malediction blazed in response to the shift in her emotions. Depression crystallized into something purer, sharper. Not hope. Not resolve. Something that came before those things, something older and less reasoned.
Wrath.
"I didn't survive Sinclair to rot here!!", Lea snarled, her translucent form flickering with black and golden light that had no business existing in this place and existed anyway.
"I didn't complete the Fourth Step, didn't face a goddamn Zankur army, didn't get carved open and put back together just to become another shape crawling around in the gray!!"
The ground beneath her feet cracked. The gray expanse fractured in a ring around her, lines spreading outward like something being told to remember what breaking felt like.
"I'm done being helpless!! Done being used!! Done being thrown around by things I can't understand, by things that don't have the decency to explain themselves before they try to own me!!"
Her Cursed Constructs manifested properly now, feeding on rage instead of despair, finding purchase in the heat of it where they had found nothing in the cold. Black crystalline armor spread across her translucent form, piece by piece, solidifying her existence in this place, insisting on it.
"The Law of Unconscious marked me?! Then I'll tear that mark out with my own hands!!"
Golden blades erupted from her fists and she let them, let them grow, let them become the shape of everything she was refusing.
"Charlotte manipulates me? Then I'll become strong enough that she can't! I'll become strong enough that nobody can!!"
Shadow writhed around her feet as Cloak activated, her form becoming more solid, more real. It mixed with Silence and became a black cloak covering her entire body, shimmering at its edges with golden light, the two powers intertwining the way they always had, the way that felt like her own specific language.
Her golden eyes blazed.
"I am Lea Darkwill!!". she roared it into the gray void with no sky, with no echo, into a space that swallowed sound and gave nothing back. "And I refuse to be anyone's puppet ever again!!"
The faceless demons materialized around her, drawn by her declaration, rising out of the gray landscape like things that had always been just beneath it. Waiting patiently. Confident in the way that things with forever to spare are always confident.
Lea gave a vicious, feral smile. Power surged from inside her, past the limits of what this place should have allowed, past the resistance of the space itself.
"Come on then...", she hissed, blades raised and ready, "Let's see if I can kill you."
The first demon lunged.
Lea's Judgement Blade carved through it like the thing was made of nothing. The creature dissolved into smoke without a sound, leaving only the brief impression that it had been there.
"Good..."
Her voice was cold now, the rage underneath it compressed into something that could last.
"I was hoping they'd bleed."
More demons emerged from the gray landscape. Rising from the ground, dropping from the void above, drifting in from every direction with the unhurried certainty of things that had never needed to hurry.
Lea didn't retreat.