Tread Lightly

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Wyatt Graves

A whole stressful hour passes as I push the curse down from Virgil's forehead to his neck. At the point that his neck touches his shoulders, the curse holds strong, refusing to budge despite my best efforts. When I notice this, I try to force it through, thinking it is a hurdle to surpass, but it wouldn't work.

No matter how much I try, the curse won't recede any further, and because of the effort I used to push past the block, I once again reached the limit of my Ether saturation. With a body at the brink once more, I quickly but full of anguish grab Law's Light, ready to consume it with the Bloody Palm to keep trying to save him.

But as I hold onto it with my left hand, which has recovered quite a bit from its own buffet of artifacts, Vernon yells to me.

"You did it! The curse isn't moving anymore! It's stopped at the neck!"

I look over at the surprising news, almost unbelieving. And he's right. The shimmering phantasmal body of Virgil only exists below his neck. Have we held it off enough that it has stopped spreading throughout his body?

"Do you think he'll be good? You think the curse is done spreading?"

Vernon glances at me briefly, filled with hope, before turning back to his elder brother.

"I think so. At the very least, the curse has stabilized. You can take a quick nap; I'll watch over him. It'd be best if you were prepared to help again without sacrificing another expensive artifact. Any item we have is worth his life, but we still need to eat. Before you do, though, can you check if the progenitor had an artifact emerge from it? Hopefully, it did. That will compensate for the loss of Cutting Words and the Boa Bugle."

I nod to Vernon as I stand shakily, the first time in over an hour that I'm not wrapped in the chains wrought from Daydreaming on another with all my might. Without having to be careful of the restrictions that it places on the rest of my body, I went all the way and then some.

It was like being under a dozen weighted blankets, gagged, blindfolded, and getting your brain rung simultaneously. Not a pleasant experience.

I shake my head away from those stressful thoughts. We did it. I look around for the potential artifact the progenitor turned into when the spirit dissipated into light. Surely that tough bastard would leave behind enough desires to create an artifact.

As I look around, though, I notice how quiet the town is. All that remains is the almost inaudible whispers from Vernon to his unconscious brother and the crackling fire that burns down the building I was on earlier.

The blaze is radiant and burning, using the whole building to stave off the cold of the deep night. I take a moment to just feel the warmth on my skin and the peaceful air. I push off finding the artifact and rest to just enjoy the moment.

Euphoria fills me alongside the relaxing comedown of adrenaline.

I did it. I avenged Lonnie. It feels great. The relief, the satisfaction, the weight lifted from my shoulders. The kid is no longer being tormented as a ghostly Bakwa. Instead, he is taken by Death to be judged. I do know that the Red Judge will be fair.

No kid ever deserves his sentencing, and it's said that the only time he is ever lenient is with children. Hopefully, he is sent to the White Fields of Comfort, the only semi-peaceful place in the underworld. Where only the best are sent.

A slight chance exists he might be pulled a bit deeper into the Gray Salts of Loneliness, but at least that place isn't torture; it's more so just a limbo to slowly pass until the soul fades into nothingness.

But at least there's no way the Red Judge would sentence him to the Black Dungeons of Penitence or Crimson Court of Suffering. No child ever deserves to go to those two places.

I freed him from his current suffering. That's all that really matters. I'm sure that even the Salts would be nicer than whatever he was experiencing as the progenitor Bakwa's pawn. Avenging him and freeing his spirit feels terrific. The catharsis allows me to calm down remarkably after the battle, my breathing slowing to a more regular gait.

One down. One to go. The next will likely be ten times more complicated, though. Alexos, despite how he looked the last time I saw him, will not be an easy foe to face. The Phantom Pain has made it all the way to the 6th Sigil.

And if there's one thing I've learned in the short month or two since I gained a Sigil, every step forward costs more of your soul and leaves a trail of bodies behind you. The only thing you can do is try to stop the fallen from being those you care about.

My moment of calm ends after a few minutes of peace as my eyes scan the surroundings and find something in the direction of where the Bakwa's light dissipated too. A small cerulean glass-like org lays in the sand, almost impossible to notice.

I stumble over to it and pick it up after covering my hand in cloth. I'm unwilling to pick up an artifact with my bare hands without knowing what it does first. But I am willing to inspect it closely with my eyes.

The orb is not made of glass despite its shiny reflecting texture. It's an eyeball. One from the Bakwa and within the blue eyes where even the pupil is blue, just a darker shade than the rest, I see shifting figures.

Figures that resemble the smaller Bakwas, not the larger ones made of adults or the progenitor, but instead ghost-like bodies that look like deformed children.

My heart sinks as the possibility of me freeing the little guy rises. Did I not actually free Lonnie? Was he just put into this damned artifact from the leftover emotions of the ghost?

I put my eye closer to the glassy orb, peering into the blue-tinted world of ghosts that lie within. I try to decipher and see what truly lies within, and relief washes over me after a few moments of observation.

The ghosts within are not the Bakwa's I've seen lately and come to know. They are even smaller and deformed things that move with disturbing and eerie jaunts within the small orb. Spirits that the progenitor must not have wanted to use or risk.

I do not know how the progenitor controlled, stored, or actually transformed people, but it seems as though some didn't go quite as planned. And it's those malformed Bakwas that remain after its death.

Some of the malformed Bakwa are those with hands that are twice as long as the others but legs with backward knees. Some others have tiny heads and large bodies. Others have massive skulls but no eyes of any sort on their faces.

It is all disconcerting and weird. It's one thing to see deformed ghosts that come from humans, but when those ghosts are deformed? It is pretty dismal to look at. I can understand why the Bakwa didn't use these few dozen broken souls.

Its transformation process must not have been perfect, or something caused it to mess up, so it didn't want to use its flawed creations. I just wonder if these spirits still have any sense of self. If any intelligence remains.

It's something to think about later. Because now that I found the eyeball of an artifact, I want to rest. I can put the infrequent form of an artifact off for later in favor of sleep.

I still have a mission to do, after all. This was just for me.

Sitting down next to Vernon and the stabilized Virgil, I hand the man the eyeball wrapped in cloth. Then as I listen to his exhausted excitement, I lay down and close my eyes. His tired and concerned voice enters my ears even as I drift to sleep.

"This is great. An eyeball is one of the hardest forms of artifacts to get. This thing will surely make up for Cutting Words and the Boa Bugle. It might even give Law's Light a run for its..."

***************

I wake up as the sun shines light onto Harmony Town, the first of its rays hitting my closed eyelids and prompting my brain to turn on. As I sit up, still with a headache, although it's lessened, and a wounded body, I see Virgil sitting on a post of the recently burned down building, his body no longer flickering and see-through.

Weariness immediately fades, and I move toward him, sore and full of pain but endlessly curious.

"You're alive! How is your body fine? Wasn't the curse still present?"

Virgil speaks to me with a smile as he looks at the rising sun, the rays not yet hitting him as he's behind a pole.

"Some crazy shit happened. I don't know how, but I did an act of Absolution in the process of surviving. Apparently, my Sigil shifted towards a future form, the Wraith. Now I can phase in and out of the world. Becoming incorporeal, but there some huge downsides."

I stare at the man I thought was dead as I stand up and notice that Dakota slept beside me the whole time. Grunting to pick up the fox, as I am still weak, I walk over to the older man. I also notice that Vernon is asleep in a bedroll beside Virgil.

"How can there be a downside? You can literally dodge like any attack now?! Bullets will barely affect you, let alone blades, and if it's as strong as the progenitors, they will probably just pass right through you without an effect at all."

He sighs as he shows me his hand, and for a brief moment, it flickers, barely visible and mostly see-through like a ghost, to the point that every internal part of the hand can be seen, then turns corporeal once more.

When he does it, I see him flinch and shiver like he just saw someone he loves die.

"It might seem like that, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. The curse still has me, but it's just that my Sigil has shifted to hold it at bay passively. The Sigil skill from the Absolution doesn't make me fade; it makes me corporeal. From the second I woke up, I've been constantly using Ether. And whenever I Flicker, the sights and sounds within the other realms are far too much, and it feels like I'm being eaten. Not just that, but whenever I go back and forth quickly, the cost ramps up direly like the fabric dislikes being repeatedly torn through."

His condition not being wholly solved surprises and worries me. I sympathize with the stuff he's forced to see; I imagine it's similar to the Bloody Palm's dark invasive murmurs.

I sit down next to him beside the charred pole of the burned building and try to talk to him about it.

"You okay? I have quite some experience with otherworldly whispers."

Virgi's eyes quickly flit to my left hand and then back to his brother.

"Yeah, I know; Vernon told me about you being Artificed while you were out. I was gonna ask you for some help. That, and I wanted to say thanks. I know it wasn't easy to save me. Hell, I didn't think I could be saved until you appeared."

Virgil's wording confuses me. What does he mean until I appeared?

"What do you mean appeared?"

He motions with his hands toward me, trying to explain.

"I was near death, I could feel myself turning into whatever those things are from the progenitor's curse, and I felt you reach out to help me. The issue in my actual survival was that the Mother Below didn't like my survival for some reason and fought against it. The only reason I'm even here right now is that somehow you reached even further and grabbed me, allowing me to break her bet and Absolve myself."

His words sink in for a moment before a litany of questions arises. The Mother Below? I've never heard of her before. And by my extra reach, did he mean the Bloody Palm's unusual aid? What does he mean by breaking her bet and Absolving himself? I try to ask him individually, but they all come out simultaneously because I'm too curious.

"Who's the Mother Below? Is it a God? What did it look like when I reached out to you? Bloody? And what do you mean by bet or Absolvance?"

Virgil raises his hands in an attempt to slow my roll of inquiries, but he does answer them all slowly and deliberately as if telling a long story. I listen attentively to his lengthy explanation.

"Whoa, whoa, slow down. I just woke up from near death about an hour ago. Give me some time to think. Your first question, though, is easy, although quite long. We've got plenty of time, though, as Vernon will be out for a while. The Mother Below's story is long but incredibly vital for those who seek the higher tiers of strength with Sigils, and I think you do, so I'll tell you the whole thing. The lower level of the library in the Hunter Headquarters has all this stuff. I only learned it because my younger sisters wanted bedtime stories, and I was too lazy to make them up.

The Mother Below is the one who created our world and all the things that live in it, although She seems to hate humans the most. First, She made plants, fish, and birds. Then, She wished for intelligent life and created humans.

Along with humans, though, the Mother Below made a large variety of beasts, reptiles, and even the first few Goliaths. Many years are said to have passed after that until humanity became too powerful, spread out amongst the entire world and all its three continents, innumerable islands, and five oceans. But gradually, it's said that the Mother Below became dissatisfied with humans and our ways of life. That we were not enough. Our skills with Ether, resonance with Sigils, and ingenuity were insufficient for the Mother."

Virgil pauses to breathe, the man moving on the makeshift slightly to be more comfortable.

"This whole time, Sigils existed but were rare and only found by the strongest or the cruelest. Maybe one in ten thousand were said to possess even a 1st Sigil; nowadays, it's probably closer to one in a hundred. And that back then, beyond fourth Sigil didn't exist. So, She created demons. Creatures that are everything humans are and more.

The strength of beasts. The intelligence of humans. The resonance of the Nahullo. She even created a place for them. Hell. The deepest region of the earth, even beneath the underworld, where the dead lie. This is where they all emerged from, deep below."

Another pause ensues with a look of envy on his face. Of course, anyone would be jealous when some are born with all the gifts possible.

"At this point, the old Gods still lived as well, uncorrupted, and while not kind, they were not antagonistic. The only God not among them was the Arbiter of Chaos, the Devil; he arose later. But the demons were sent on a crusade against the humans by the Mother Below to reset Her world in their likeness.

There was only one solace for man. Demons are low in number and have issues coupling. In addition, for some reason, after the initial rush of demons from Hell, none more have ever come. So, we were able to live past this dark era. The continents were split off from each other, and we lost contact. We could never communicate much before, yet many of the old books in the library spoke of ships and trade here or there. But after the Demonic Wars past the Collapse, all was lost."

Virgil's eyes grow dark, shadows swimming in them as a visceral emotion exits his pupils, each syllable angry yet proud.

"Humanity was pushed from all of Mari, the continent our feet lay above, to just the eastern coast. We only survived because of one man, the First. It's said he was the first man to ever reach the Angelic realm, joining the many demons and few Pygmies and Nahullo to have also done so, earning his title. He created the order of Hunters over a thousand years ago. He kept us alive until his fall in a pyrrhic victory to Leviathan, the eventual and now current Binary Lord.

He bought us some years to survive, but it is unknown if any other segments of the world are still full of human life. Most think that we only live because of him and that all other regions fell without such a monster of man to guide them."

Virgil smacks his lips as he begins to wrap up his story, explaining it all.

"Anyway, this is all to answer some of your questions simultaneously. I know it's long, but it should make a little sense.

It's during our survival with the First that something terrible occurs. At this time, many people are stuck at the 6h Sigil and cannot rise, while demons, beasts, ghosts, and other creatures can. The otherplanars have always been powerful, and more of them are beginning to appear, each unpredictable and lethal.

The Mother Below then decides she will act personally and kill us. She descends a part of her will to press upon the First while he is in a battle against Mammon, a mighty demon at the time. The First was winning, and the Mother wished it was not so. No one knows if she did this because she was waking up again or if she truly hated the man so much that she could strike from her slumber.

She bet against him and tried to crush him in conjunction with Mammon, but the First survived, wounded, mentally damaged, and partially crippled, but he survived. And because he did, he performed the first-ever Absolution. His skill, which came from his Absolution, was said to be the most unique thing in the world, a once-in-a-eternity thing. But it was not to be. Eventually, he fell, Leviathan slaying him before he could grow more potent at the young age of thirty."

The man finishes mentioning the legend from long ago as his head falls backward onto the charred post, his voice ringing with forlorn sadness.

"It's always been thought that the Mother Below is where Sigils come from first, starting with placing them in plants, which were then slowly devoured and moved throughout the biosphere of life. I'm not sure if that's true, though. Just based on the short glimpses I've seen through the cracks in the fabric from Flicker, I'm led to believe the Mother Below might just be a being above a God, capable of creating, or at the very least, affecting a mass amount Sigils at a large scale. Kind of like Resonant Attraction but much more powerful.

So, anyway, this is all to say that when the Mother Below bets against you, it's because there's a reason she wants you dead. You will either cause many demons to die, her chosen children, or you will save many people, her hated children.

There is another thing that also happens: if you ever win a bet against her, it's said it becomes ten times harder for you to do it again, for she'll coalesce ten times the pressure to make sure you stay down.

And in breaking her hold over you, the Sigil within you shifts, changes, and grows to match you and the actions you've taken. Absolutions are sporadic acts that allow one to grow and reach unseen heights. Heights that only the ones with unbreakable wills, complex skills, unfathomable minds, or otherworldly luck can achieve."

A short pause, a final one, starts as Virgil turns thankful.

"I think that my case is several of those. When I was on the verge of giving up, you who were reaching out to me had tendrils of red-black sludge hone in and stab into me before bringing me closer and saving me.

So, again, thank you for not only saving me but allowing a peasant-born orphan such as me to do what only legends are said to of done."

For close to a full minute after his story, we sit in silence, me understanding all that he had said, and him, watching the growing rays of the sun from behind the charred pole.

I take a quick glance at the Bloody Palm and say a quiet thank you to the murderous and insatiable hand. I have no clue why it helped, but it does look back to normal. Maybe it just did so because it had excess. That's what happens whenever it devours to heal me, after all.

After my thanks to the palm, my attention turns to the revelations Virgil gave me, creation stories I've never even heard a little about, and the being that did it all.

The Mother Below, this God above Gods, bet against me, and I defied Her. I don't know how I did, though.

All I did was funnel Ether into myself non-stop at the maximum speed I could as the executioner's blade from the big man fell toward me. I have no idea how that was able to do it.

I turn back to Virgil to discuss Absolutions with him, both his and mine, as I see him reach a hand out from behind the shade from the pole into the daylight, possibly sensing that something is off. The second he does so, a scream of pain and surprise erupts from him.

Everywhere the warm daylight touches, his hand is set ablaze.