A blue screen popped up in front of the now-shivering enchantress. She looked at the disappearing motes of what would have been the Demon God's body. She fell on her ass.

  “This is so much worse than she said,” the enchantress sighed.

  She grabbed the pulsating entity that was the mantle of authority. Rafe expected something to happen. Nothing did. She sighed again.

  “I'll need to find my way to you, then.”

  She looked up at a set of stairs that had not been there before, then down at her status screen. Rafe was confused. All the gods of Skyholm had existed before the system, from what he remembered. Then he remembered the vision of the phoenix. Something had distracted her. An anomaly. The enchantress. She'd sent a system-like ability to her past self through a time concept.

  “You had the system, mistress?” the girl next to the ghostly enchantress watching the vision like him asked.

  “Yes,” the god answered easily.

  “Did you… Mistress? Are you the one who created the system?”

  He did not get to hear the answer. The young and broken enchantress got her cut-off arm and attached it to its stump. Then she chugged back a shimmering light blue potion that appeared out of nowhere. Some kind of storage ability no doubt.

  She started to heal, her leg popping as it tried to regain its shape. Bits of muscle extended from her shoulder to the arm she was holding. The myriad of broken bones and tiny wounds covering her body started to heal before Rafe's eyes.

  In the end, her leg was a bloated mess, her arm only attached to her shoulder by strings of muscle, the bone having failed to fuse.

  “Shit! Now I gotta wait for the cool down, and I doubt one more round will be enough.”

  She looked at the stairs that had appeared when she killed the young Demon who would be a god. She sighed as she got to her feet.

  “And the climb goes on,” she declared before touching the mantle and storing it away.

  She summoned her staff again, and, using it as a cane, started to shuffle toward the stairs. The ghostly enchantress turned to answer her ward, and then the vision shimmered and broke apart. The nothingness of the void returned.

  Rafe stood in the enchantress’ atrium, staring at the woman herself. The woman was frowning at the now dispersed vision.

  “That is not what I meant to show you,” was what she said first.

  “Okay,” Rafe hesitated. “But now that I've seen it, did you create the system?”

  “That is not the right question,” the enchantress shot back, unperturbed.

  “Alright. How did you create the system?”

  “Close, but still irrelevant. You do not need that knowledge, Rafael Kingsley.”

  “Then what knowledge do I need?”

  “I don't know. What knowledge do you think you need? And have you the merits to ask for it?”

  “Fine?” Rafe said, throwing his hands up. “What is the system? Tell me at least that much.”

  The enchantress frowned. “It appears you have enough merits to hear this. Alright then, the system is nothing more than a consciousness for the essence. A way to make the essence less chaotic.”

  “That answers nothing,” Rafe complained, already tired of the non-answers.

  Liam had said the same thing so the information was useless. Then something occurred to him.

  “What is the essence then?”

  The enchantress nodded, though her expression did not change.

  “A pertinent question. The essence…is like a fire. A natural phenomenon. It requires fuel. Unlike fire though, essence burns the little fuel it has to create more fuel. It burns so bright in the beginning.”

  “The primordial flame?” Rafe breathed.

  “Good. And do you know what fuel it creates from that magnificent power?”

  Rafe shook his head.

  “The universe cores. The origins, I like to call them. From the core, worlds emerge. Worlds the essence pollutes. In areas of high concentration, dungeons build.”

  “And from the dungeons…” Rafe deduced.

  “Yes. Life emerges.”

  “So where is the core of the multiverse?”

  The enchantress chuckled. “You do not have enough merits to know that. It does not matter though. You will know it in time. It is the reason I have been manipulating everything after all.”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Okay. Rafe wasn't going to touch that bait no matter how much he wanted to. He suddenly remembered a burning question he had to ask the enchantress one way or the other.

  “Aeon. The trial world? What is going to happen to it?”

  “Nothing,” the enchantress frowned. “It is a trial world. It will be reset and reused for the next trial and so forth just like it always has.”

  “Oh. But…”

  “Say what you have to say,” the god ordered.

  “You could save them. You could save Aeon. We both know there is more going on here than that being a trial world. Aeon is special.”

  The god shrugged. “Those people. The real people died millennia ago. These are not the real people in any way.”

  “But they are people!”

  The enchantress blinked but did not let any other kind of reaction past her calm mask.

  Rafe shrugged. “I'm willing to agree to whatever you want. To what you've been manipulating me to do. Just please, find a way to save them.”

  He stared at her, at her emotionless face. He let his determination shine through. He kept his shaking hands to himself. She stared at him in silence for a long moment.

  She sighed as she looked away at last.

  “You fear me? Loathe me even.”

  He did not dispute her words. Maybe Samantha and the phoenix thought they were joking when they spewed vitriol against her, but Rafe had taken most of it to heart. He hadn't seen enough to change his impression so far.

  Sure, she was strong and it was kind of inspiring the way she fought the Demon God and just got up to keep moving. It was also kind of sad what she'd gone through in that tower. She had looked like a child still. That did not change the fact that she was manipulative and calculating and all-around scary.

  “You seem to be mistaken about something. I did not manipulate anything to force you to do what I want. You are going to do it regardless. It is your fate. I knew the moment you got that skill. I only manipulated things to give you the tools you'd need to survive. In fact, I will not even tell you what it is I want from you. You'll find out at the right time.”

  Rafe felt his heart start to freeze. His chest was suddenly heavy, and his breathing stilted.

  “...so… the deal? The people of Aeon?”

  “Is not, are not things I'm particularly concerned with,” she said as she turned away from him, staring into the void with an impartial face.

  Rafe couldn't believe it. He stayed there, staring at her back for a long time. This had been his last hope to do something for Aeon. Now… A bit of moisture fell down his face. He scrambled to clean it.

  “I want…” his voice broke.

  He took a moment to collect himself.

  “I want an eye. The phoenix eye,” he said, his voice called.

  The enchantress faced him. He couldn't tell what she was thinking from her blank expression. She waved her hand and held something small and round in her hand.

  “Just so you know,” she said before handing it over, “Noid will be exhausted for a long time after your trial. If you feel so strongly about it, then get strong enough to save that world. Get strong enough fast enough.”

  She threw him the eye and disappeared. He was out of her atrium and he'd not even needed to lift a foot.

  “Well, there is that at least,” he said bitterly. “Now, how do I use…”

  The eye got off his palm and floated in front of his face. He jerked backward in surprise, ducking and hiding his head behind his arms, turtling up. It did nothing, just floating in place and pulsing with strong magic. He started to let his guard down, letting go of his head and starting to rise toward the floating object. It shot towards him then, fast, like a bullet.

  He cried out in dismay, then in pain. The eye barreled into his left eye, leaving it smarting for a second. He thought maybe the thing had been forced back but then the pain started anew. The eye drilled into his still-existent eye. He screamed, cried, tried to tear his eye out.

  Then the pain spiked suddenly and his brain could not handle it. Rafe blacked out.

  ****

  He woke what he considered instantly. Only there was no way he was awake. When he opened his eyes there was water. He was in a fast-flowing river, moving along with the tide.

  He did not feel wet. He barely felt the movement. And the water was a blue so pure, it seemed almost cartoonish. It was surreal. And then they came, the water spirits —maybe elementals, but that sounded wrong.

  Rafe was almost sure this was a dream, only he couldn't wake himself up no matter how much he tried.

  The spirit things were shy at first, peering at him from behind water bubbles they didn't seem to know were one hundred percent transparent to Rafe. When he looked at them they would pop into hundreds of tiny bubbles and disappear.

  He pretended he couldn't see them, let them sneak up on his slowly drifting body. With soft hands and curious little ringing noises, the little blue spirits surrounded him and talked their heads off. He opened his eyes suddenly. Only a few noticed. Some popped away. Some did not.

  A spirit, brighter coloured than the others, drifted from what passed for ground in this surreal environment. It crossed its hands over its chest, or what passed for hands on a being made of water. Rafe blinked at it, not understanding its intent. It took offense to that. Attacked his nose.

  “Hey, are you the violent one? The others are so cute and you—”

  It squeaked loudly in complaint. The others soon joined it as it tried to argue it was merely trying to protect them. Or so Rafe interpreted via his lip reading skill (which he did not have.)

  “This big scary kid came out of nowhere! We can't trust him! Let me beat him up a little, yeah.”

  “You say that about everyone, Leon.”

  “You are just violent!”

  “He is a good visitor this time.”

  “I am not violent,” the brute seemed to be getting violent even in Rafe's little comedy. “I am strong. There is a difference.”

  Rafe continued to try and fill in the dialogue and what their little chimes meant.

  Then something came. Something bigger, stronger, ancient even. A large eyeball at the horizon where the river supposedly fed into an unseen mouth. It snapped right onto him and studied him.

  Then darkness fell and there were more spirits though they did not approach the river. Dark spirits. At least darker than the water spirits. They stayed at the edge of the river, studying Rafe very intently. In contrast to the playful yet capricious nature of the water spirits, these were somber, professional, mature even.

  The cloud of darkness they had come from hung over the potion of river Rafe was traveling in.

  Then he saw it, trying to hide within the shadow of the cloud. A golden throne so high it pierced the clouds.

  His thoughts stuttered to a halt as he saw a bunch of shimmering golden…faeries, flit around the throne. He was trying to remember something Liam had told him. Trying and failing miserably.

  He was sure Liam had said something about a throne. The throne noticed he'd noticed it, and it shied back a little. He frowned as its colour deemed and some of the faeries’ faces reddened.

  Then it faced him again. It did not have a face, so he had no idea how he knew it was facing him. His thoughts started to slow, stutter, die. And then with a gasp, Rafe Kingsley woke from his dreams.