I had no time to even understand where that voice was coming from or the meaning of its voice when the bones of my right arm changed next, extending into spears, and it stabbed downward into my own thigh, the spear-bones driving through the muscle of the leg until they hit the femur and stopped, before it continued slicing down to my knee.

I went down on my knees in a pool of my own organs, and my body was not my body anymore. The mutation accelerated, and my ribs were splitting outward through what skin still remained on my chest, the broken ends of them growing into the same spear-points my arms had become, as every bone in my torso rearranged itself into a configuration designed for self-destruction.

My exposed intestines lay in front of me in their slow, blind heap. My liver had stopped moving. The demonic words were louder now, and my jaw was working hard enough that I could feel something tear in the hinge as the skin of my face split until it reached my ears.

"Khaaz vel’tarakh gorum... thur’kazak shaaz... nargh..."

Through the pain, I felt my left arm move one more time.

The bone-spear of my hand drove into my own chest at an upward angle, sliding between the ribs that had not yet finished mutating, and entered my chest cavity from below.

I felt it pass into the space behind my sternum, and it pushed into something before it pulled out, bringing my heart through the front of my body.

I watched my own hand now twisted into a bone spear withdraw from my chest, holding my still-beating heart impaled on its point, the muscle of it visibly working, and the cut vessels still spurting blood in slow, weakening pulses.

The bone-spear lifted the heart in front of my face and held it there, and for two seconds, I was looking at my own beating heart.

Then the arm moved away from me and turned the impaled heart toward the edge of the pyramid where the larger demon stood watching.

The heart was pointed at the demon in offering. I felt my body moving through the puddle of my organs, drawn towards the thing that had broken my title, and the demonic words coming out of my mouth had shifted into a rhythm that was no longer chaotic, becoming more ceremonial, the syllables falling into a cadence that I recognized even though I did not know what they meant.

This was a presentation and a ritual where the offering was my heart, and the suffering I endured was just the way for this ritual to begin.

[Demonology 31 → 39 (Acolyte) — Rare — Unregistered]

"Tell me the name of God, child?"

The heart beat one more time on the end of the spear that had been my hand, then the world—

∞

I was six years old when I first had the dream.

I would find myself walking along a beach covered with bones, and the water that pooled on my feet was boiling hot, but the pain never registered.

"Khaaz... khaaz vel’tarakh... gorum sha’thrul..."

It was the sight of the water running through the empty eyes of the skulls that resembled tears that always got to me. Why would the dead still weep?

I will find myself screaming and running in fear, and like all dreams tend to do, I will find myself somewhere else, but now I know this place.

It was a small cave back in the mountains, and from within it a red light would shine rhythmically, as if it were breathing.

"Nargh thur’kazak... vel’tar gorum... shaaz..."

A fear like nothing I have ever known would seize me, because I could hear its call... like a thousand stabbing blades inside my head.

I always wake up screaming.

My parents learned to comfort me after this spell of nightmares, which happened unfailingly to me every last day of the month.

Like always, when the day breaks, I forget.

But not today.

Today... I saw the face of God.

∞

"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!"

I woke up screaming, and it took a while for me to realize that the screams were not coming out of my mouth... they were inside my head.

Even with this realization, there was nothing I could do. I lay on the cot and screamed inside my skull and listened to myself screaming and could not find the part of me that would have been able to stop.

After a while, the scream changed and became a sound, that sound became syllables, and the syllables became words.

"Khaaz... khaaz vel’tarakh..."

The demonic language was leaving my mouth without my permission, the syllables formed by my tongue and pushed out of my throat in the same guttural cadence the dying me had spoken, and I could not stop the production.

I could not even slow it down. My jaw worked, and the words came. My body had been damaged in ways that the reset had not repaired, and a small part of me was trying to force my mouth to close.

"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!"

Yet the words kept coming through my teeth. I tried to think, and the thinking did not work. There were thoughts available to me; I could feel them as shapes in my head, the vocabulary of who I was, but I could not assemble them into sequences.

I closed my eyes, and the inside of my eyelids was the demon, and it was grinning, and reaching out towards me.

[Soul Condition: Strained]

My eyes flew open, but the demon was right there beside me, reaching for my heart, and no matter how I screamed, the sound never left my head.

[Soul Condition: Strained]

I could not move. I knew that I was crying, but I did not care. I squeezed my eyes shut, but it did not help, and I could only watch the demon coming closer and closer to me.

My right hand moved, and with a speed that was born from desperation, I reached out towards my staff, and I don’t know if it was my new Attunement Skill, but my staff flew across the tent and into my palm.

Without hesitation, I turned the head of my staff and pointed it at my skull, and with the demon closing on me, I poured all my soul into conjuring a combined cast of Arc Lightning and Surge... and then there was darkness.

...

"Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!