Flaw: [Corrupted]
Flaw Description: [You have fallen to corruption]
"Corruption?" I muttered into the infinite black, then I felt it in my core.
Something that made me fall to my knees.
I grunted in pain as my hand clutched my chest, the sensation unlike anything I had ever experienced. Like ice water flowing through my veins, but wrong, tainted. Then suddenly, I was in my soul sea.
The sea of blue spiraled in my vision, but now where the sun used to lay in pristine brilliance, its brightness was dimmed as if clouds had rolled across its surface. At its center, nestled like a parasite, was a seed of black. A seed that was growing. Quickly.
I watched in horror as tendrils of darkness spread outward from the seed, creeping across the luminous surface of my soul's sun like ink spilled in water. Each pulse of growth sent waves of nausea through me, and I could feel something fundamental about myself changing, twisting.
"No," I whispered, my voice echoing strangely in this inner space. "Whatever you are, you're not taking me."
I concentrated as I felt the corruption spreading in my core, pushing against my very essence, trying to remake me into something else.
"There is no wave I can't overcome," I muttered, and somehow, though I didn't understand how, I began to push back against whatever that seed was. I imagined myself as a dam against a flood, as a lighthouse standing firm against the storm. The corruption fought me, pressing harder, but I refused to yield.
The battle felt like it lasted hours, though time seemed meaningless in this place. Sweat beaded on my brow as I strained against the invading force, my will the only weapon I had. Slowly, incrementally, I began to contain it, boxing it in, stopping its advance. The black seed pulsed angrily but could spread no further.
It couldn't have been more than three seconds since I read the runes, but it felt like an eternity. As I looked at the black scar now marring my soul, I realized almost one-fifth of my core had turned that terrible shade of midnight. The corruption sat there like a caged beast, contained but not destroyed, waiting.
"There we go," I sighed, exhaustion washing over me like a tide. I had won this battle, but I could sense it wasn't the war. This thing, whatever it was, would be with me now.
With that realization, a new string of runes appeared in front of me, glowing with an almost mocking brightness.
[Wake up Stormbringer]
The black void spun and disappeared, reality dissolving around me like smoke.
I opened my eyes, but I was no longer in the Tower, or outside of it. Gone were the stone chambers or the infinite starlit void. Instead, I found myself in a room of some kind, sterile and unfamiliar. Thin tubes and needles had been inserted into my arms, connected to strange metal contraptions. But that wasn't the worst of it—no, not by a long shot.
When I awoke, my body was thin, incredibly so. I seemed to be just skin and bones, as if I had been starving for months. My arms were like twigs, my ribs clearly visible beneath pale, almost translucent skin. I raised a trembling hand to my face and felt the sharp angles of my cheekbones, the hollow of my cheeks. My hair, once thick and reaching to my waist, was now short and brittle, as if it had been cut repeatedly during whatever time had passed.
I tried to speak but my throat was dry as parchment. How long had I been unconscious?
I looked around with growing unease. The room was mostly barren except for the bed I was lying in—though 'bed' was an understatement if anything. The metal contraptions the needles were connected to looked like nothing I had ever seen in Parthevia, all smooth surfaces and glowing lights. A few seats with cushions were arranged nearby, and there was a single door made of some white material that didn't look like wood.
This wasn't Parthevia. This wasn't anywhere I recognized.
I tried to push myself off the bed, my weakened muscles protesting with every movement. My legs shook as they touched the cold floor, threatening to buckle under even my diminished weight. That's when the door opened with a soft hiss—not the creak of hinges, but something else entirely.
Out of it came a man in his fifties, well, he looked like it, looked being the main word, since I could tell he was awakened, though I wasn't sure what rank, but it felt like he was at least a master, maybe even more so, he felt stronger than Drakon had been when we first met in the village, but he couldn't possibly be a Saint... could he?
He wore simple clothes. His eyes, though—his eyes were the same shade of pale gold as mine, and when he saw me sitting up, they filled with tears.
"You're awake," he muttered, his voice breaking slightly. Tears formed at the edges of his eyes, threatening to spill over. "You're finally awake. Thank the Spell, you're finally awake."
But his words only made things more confusing. When I heard him speak, I could understand him perfectly, but he wasn't speaking my language. The sounds coming from his mouth were foreign, yet somehow my mind was translating them instantly. It was like someone was translating it, or something.
"Uhm, I'm sorry but who are you?" I asked, my voice coming out as a hoarse whisper.
A weird grin appeared on the man's face, one of pure exhaustion mixed with overwhelming relief.
"I'm Knossos," he said, moving closer to the bed. "I'm an elder of the House of Night, and..." He paused, as if the words were difficult to say. "I'm your grandfather."
The world seemed to tilt around me.
"Wait, grandfather? House of Night? Just where exactly am I?" The questions tumbled out of me in a rush. "The last thing I remember was opening the door of the Tower with Drakon, then that black space with all the runes, and now I'm here? Where are we—are we in Parthevia? Are we close to Tyson Village?" I stopped myself, realizing how desperate I sounded.
Knossos held up a gentle hand. "Just calm down. I'll try to answer everything I can." He moved to sit on the edge of the bed, his movements careful and deliberate. "Yes, I am your grandfather. The House of Night is the clan you belong to—your bloodline. Right now we are in a house I own in Earth although now we also call it the Waking World. As for your other questions..." He sighed deeply. "I need to tell you about other things first to answer them properly."
I wanted to interrupt, to demand immediate answers, but something in his demeanor told me to wait. There was a gravity to his manner, a solemnity that suggested what he was about to tell me would change everything.
"This is going to be a hard pill to swallow," he began, meeting my eyes directly. "But everything you've lived up to this point, your entire life, all of it has been a dream. Or more accurately, a nightmare."
The words hit me like a physical blow. I opened my mouth to protest, to tell him he was wrong, that my memories were real, that I could still feel the salt spray from my father's fishing boat and hear my mother's laughter.
"Just let me finish," he said quickly, seeing my expression. "Then you can ask me all the questions you have. This is going to sound impossible, but I need you to listen."
I nodded numbly, my hands gripping the edges of the bed so tightly my knuckles went white.
"To explain everything, we have to go back about 50 years, when something called the Spell first descended upon Earth along with what we call the Seeds and nightmare creatures. We still aren't entirely sure what the Spell is—some kind of cosmic force, perhaps, or maybe something else entirely. But we do know that it fundamentally changed our world and gave humanity the ability to ascend through what we call Nightmares."
He paused, studying my face. "You have been in your First Nightmare for your entire conscious life—almost fifteen years, since you'll be 15 in the next month. That makes you what we call a Sleeper. The nightmare you experienced, while it felt completely real to you, was a construct of the Spell designed to test and shape you."
I wanted to speak, to argue, but the words wouldn't come. Everything I had believed about reality was crumbling around me.
"The Spell is also what gives us our Aspects, Flaws, Memories, Echoes, and everything else. Though you were a very special case, normally people who are infected by the Spell are between 16 and 18 at least nowadays, what you experienced is something that would have happened on the first days of the Spell. If you fail your first nightmare, you will become a nightmare creature, you hadn't so I still held hope that you were in your first nightmare alive."
Tears began to blur my vision. I had known, somehow, that I would never see Tyson Village again, never feel the spray of the sea or hear the children's laughter. But having it confirmed was like losing them all over again.
"Now I have a few questions for you," Knossos said softly. "But before that, do you have any other questions for me?"
I nodded, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. "If you're my grandfather, that means I have biological parents. Where are they?"
His expression grew even more somber. "They are both dead," he replied simply. "They died when you were an infant. That's why you've been in my care."
Oh.
The word hung in the air between us like a physical presence. So I would never meet the people who had actually given birth to me, never know their faces or their voices. In a strange way, though, it felt almost like a relief. After all the revelations, I wasn't sure I could handle the emotional complexity of meeting new parents when Bardr and Esra still felt so real, so present in my heart.
But I guess it was better this way. After all, I would never be able to think of anyone else as my true family. My only real parents were Bardr and Esra from Tyson Village, even if they had been just been constructs of a nightmare.
"Any more questions?" Knossos asked, his voice gentle but tired.
I looked at him—this stranger who was my grandfather, this man who had watched over my comatose body for fifteen years—and realized I had so many questions I didn't even know where to begin.
"Yes," I replied, my voice gaining strength. "Loads more."