Page 34 of Pain Run Rampant

It’s Invictis’s opposite. Same form, same height, same build of metal… only there is no light. No halo. This being is made of pure blackness, a void so pure it’s hard to get my eyes to focus on him.

“Who are you?” I manage to ask, and though I’m not scared, I do sound uneasy.

The head bends, tilting down toward me. Thanks to the switch in the sky, I’m able to see just how black this being is. Where the outline of its face is, I can’t even see metal. I see nothing but the outline of him with the white sky in the background.

“Absence.” The single word reverberates through me, and I find it hard to swallow after that. “I am unstoppable mayhem, the harsh disorder nature dictates. Tumultuous havoc which demands sacrifice.”

With each word I hear, the arms around me stiffen even more. Soon enough I can’t breathe, and no amount of struggling breaks me free.

“The opposite of light is not darkness. It is omission. I am that absence, that which you can never grasp.” The arms circle me so tightly I feel as if my body might get squished against him, but then one of his hands moves to the back of my head. “I am oblivion.”

The same moment he says the final word, he pushes me inside his black, colorless body. I can’t fight him, I can’t do a thing. All I can do is soundlessly scream as the void itself swallows me whole.

And then everything stops.

Or, it feels like it stops, but the moment a gentle breeze caresses my cheek, my eyelids fly open. A part of me thinks I’mwaking up near Frederick and Invictis, but when I open my eyes I see I’m not at a makeshift camp.

I’m in a city. Cobblestones line the street beneath my feet, and houses on either side of me alert me to the fact that I’m someplace I’ve never been before. The way the houses are built, hanging over the street, the architecture… where am I?

I don’t see a single living soul around me, and a weird sense of déjà vu falls upon me. It’s the same unnerving thing I felt when I first stepped foot in a village in Magnysia, before I realized damn near everyone is dead.

I’m alone in the street. I don’t hear a single thing. I need a better vantage point.

I walk until I find a house that I can easily climb up. I get a boost to the second story of the house thanks to some oddly-placed barrels, and from there I can swing myself around to the front of the house, where a balcony sits, jutting out over the street. After climbing onto the balcony’s railing, I jump for the edge of the roof, just barely able to reach. Soon enough I’m hauling myself onto the roof and carefully move to the peak.

The houses around are the same size, so when I do a three-sixty spin, I’m able to have a good view all around. And what I see… my instincts were right.

Rows and rows of houses just like the one I stand on now, countless, as far as the eye can see. In the far distance, miles away, I see a few watchtowers. It’s only when I’m nearing the end of my spin that I spot an impressive castle built high above the rest of the city—larger than any castle I’ve ever seen, bigger than all three empresses’ castles put together.

This isn’t Laconia. This is someplace else.

Once I get down from the roof, I start walking. I don’t know what I’m supposed to see, but there must be more to it than realizing this is another kingdom in a land far away fromLaconia. As I walk, I wonder if this is where the spies came from, the ones who unleashed Invictis twenty years ago.

Hmm. There’s still more to this puzzle. Has to be.

I walk for what feels like ages until I reach a market of some kind, with stalls built into the outer edge of the houses. I see not a soul. No people going about their daily business, no one at all, and if there’s one thing I learned in Laconia, it’s that a people-less city is never a good sign.

The breeze blows by again, and I catch a whiff of something. Something off, something rancid. Though following a smell like that is the last thing I want to do, that’s exactly what I end up doing. My nose leads the way, and I eventually find myself in an intersection of two streets, which wouldn’t be worthy of note on a normal day, but this definitely ain’t a normal day.

Why?

Oh, no reason. It’s just that, in the center of this intersection is a pile of charred bodies. No longer burning, but still sizzling and smoking. The clothes have completely burned away, along with the outer layer of skin. It’s a horrible sight, and I hold a hand over my mouth to stop myself from retching when I notice a small arm sticking out of the pile.

A child’s arm.

What the fuck happened here?

I move around the pile of burnt bodies, and as I do so, a second pile comes into focus, one that was blocked by the initial charred mound of corpses. This second pile wasn’t burned, but it’s close enough to the first that it makes me think these bodies were meant to be thrown onto the fire as it burned.

How… how can you toss people into a fire like that? What the fuck kind of reasoning do you use to defend an action like this?

All the bodies in the second pile are facedown. Something tugs at me, an invisible string that forces me to kneel beside the pile and pull at the arm of the corpse on top to roll it over. Thebody slumps as I move it, and the moment the man’s corpse rolls, I stand and take a step back.

The man was sick. The veins in his body turned black and bulging. The blood vessels in his eyes popped, the corners of his eyes leaking some kind of black liquid. His mouth is much the same: dried-up, dark liquid had oozed out of either side.

I glance at the second pile. Now that his body wasn’t blocking the rest of the pile, I’m able to see other faces—and what I see tells me whatever this man was sick from, these other poor people were sick with, too.

What the hell is going on here?

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