Insanity

There was no more pressure holding Arthur from sinking into the ground. It was all a parallel universe, the up and down vanished, the dark became light, and there was no more atmosphere around him.

Instead of the cave he had entered, he now floated in an infinite sea of nothingness, in front of two coiling colossal spheres, two stars about to collide. There, an astonishing amount of energy exuded from the scenery, by the time Arthur could discern anything, he discovered the pain he had gone through until now was nothing compared to cooking alive.

The spheres were distant, over a dozen of times his height, and marked by a blinding point of contact. It was the only detail that made it comparable to an object.

'An hourglass?'

He tried to speak, but there was nothing to replenish his lungs on.

It was obvious, unlike the royal shield and Smite, that this artifact was alive, immaterial. He reached for it, leaving in front of him a hand incapable of reaching its goals once more. He was almost disappointed to know the trophy gallery of the palace was too small for the marvelous miracle he observed.

He moved his lips and used his cheeks to give sound to his request.

"Could you help me become someone stronger?"

If he had enough water to do so, he would've cried. Out of the blue, he faced a mute authority, a power so tangible it radiated an invaluable excess of energy. Its grace started to burn his retina, to the point he barely had the time to see his nails melting.

It shone, way too bright. It brimmed with such a power that the tip of his fingers soon was charred under the heat.

Now that he could taste it, he couldn't understand how easy it was for the entity to dwarf all of his previous experiences, to outshine his misery within an instant. He felt his skin stick to his bones, and shrink as it cooked, he felt his heart rate soar while he was unable to do a thing about it.

His eyes exploded and leaked in a slow mess constantly evaporating under the omnipresent heat.

His consciousness faded before his body was entirely consumed, engulfed by the silent terror that he might've failed somewhere.

A tremor shook Titan's Claws, it spread through the kingdom down to the sea and bordering rivers. No bird dared to stay on its branch, no living being could stay asleep. All had to witness the strength of an incoming disaster, an impending doom.

One blink.

Two.

Three. Gasp!

Arthur woke up next to a pile of burnt charcoal and grey cinders. His first reflex was to move, to look around, and to understand the meaning behind the ridiculous dream. Next to him, an orange lake, a puddle of molten snow reflecting the last rays of the sun in the evening, penetrated through the wide entrance of the cave.

A glorious spectacle was unfolding before his eyes, as soon as he was capable of standing up, he saw the sky, mimicking cooling molten metal. A patchwork of shades of grey, warmed by thin red slices of sun touching the horizon.

For an instant, he paused, he let himself imagine he was alone, relieved of his torments and duty, free from his shackles as he looked at the sunset. All his anxieties had gone up in smoke, as if another fantastic dream could take him further away, only for a moment, so he could conceive to have reached peace of mind.

He was thankful. To have a chance to start from scratch, to take one step out of the cave.

'To have the opportunity to kill this bastard.' He thought before realizing his wounds were nothing but distorted memories. Even though he was moved by the landscape, welcoming his presence, he couldn't shed a tear. There was no liquid to humidify his cheeks, it was the only sensation that felt off.

A sharp sound missed his ear by a hair's breadth, the thing ripped against the rock behind.

"Don't shoot you idiot!" A faraway voice said a man in his thirties was pushing someone away.

"That's a freaking cave elf!" A woman replied, pushing back her friendly assailant.

Back to the man, he pointed in Arthur's direction with a pinch of stress in his voice. "No pointy ears! That's a human! With a bit of luck, he'll be able to talk!"

Arthur laid his eyes on what looked like two bulky barbarians. Light pieces of armor covered their shoulders and knees, and pieces of rough leather and fur-coated the internal part of it. The lines on their muscles could be discerned up to their hips, a thick layer of fat held by a part of their outfit and belt hid the rest.

Arthur looked at his feet, at himself. He was stark naked, covered in the same black powder blanketing the inside of the cave. He needed a few more minutes for his eyes to get used to the light anew, it was still blurry and overwhelmingly shiny. His nails were long, broken at their tip and the odd sensation he had tickling his neck triggered countless feverish images of his acts.

There was no snow under his feet anymore, just an endless slope with light beige pebbles that rolled their way down under the weight of his feet.

He squinted his eyes and offered them some darkness with the palm of his hand. He saw hundreds of shiny fibers falling in front of his face, it was his hair, stained just like the rest of his body. It gave him a slight idea of how much time had passed. However, it further corroded his thoughts with what he had to consider unreal.

The two barbarians approached, the woman spoke first, and they let their guard down a little too fast to Arthur's taste.

"Thanks, Milda you dodged my arrow! Might've made quite the mistake down there!" There was a little bit of wonder and happiness in her smile until the man stomped her feet.

"You missed because I pushed you, dimwit! Can't you see he's disorientated?" He asked, raising his one-block eyebrow high on his forehead.

The barbarians stood awkwardly, waiting for a word, for anything to confirm Arthur was no savage cave elf. They looked at his body and noticed an abnormality. Despite the lack of visible scars, the entire area near his solar plexus was spared from dirt. Where his skin had been healed, the glands able to create sweat were inexistent, it prevented dirt from sticking, thus the peculiar attention they paid to the mark lasted more necessary.

Arthur could scent the fresh fragrance of sap, the recent rain, and even their stench. There was a discomfort in his sight, a sort of floating particles all around them.

"How did you get here?" The man asked with a reproachful tone.

As soon as he saw the strange dust passing through his fingers without altering their course, he understood what he was observing. 'Magicules!' Alas, as soon as he focused on it, on the magnificent flow of energy that polluted every bit of air around them, he started to lose his balance. They shone once so often with a myriad of colors, like a cloud of glass particles unable to harm anyone.

The barbarians looked at him, falling on the ground and contorting in euphoria. Then they looked at each other, asking themselves the same question. "Should we wake up milady?" The woman proposed.

"Yup. Let's do that, I'll carry the small fry to the camp, you go for her." The man replied laughingly, pushing his thumb above his shoulder.

The motivation Arthur needed to stop looking at the new form of life crowding the entire atmosphere around him was a little bigger than the mountain they stood on. He could've seen a dozen of tents nearby, all with a sharp angle to split the wind and stay anchored with little effort.

"Hey, buddy? Buddy? You listening or what?" The man asked, losing patience with each worthless attempt to shake the insane man.

"And they said it was a simple mission..." He sighed under the mad laugh that echoed between the peaks.

Since his guest refused to react, he sat next to him in the gravel, he was careful enough to not let Arthur roll off the slope. He asked something almost irrelevant, but the reciting tone he used made it sound more like a poem than a routine.

"Is there anyone else with you...? When did your exploration mission start? Are you a mage or a non-mage? Have you met anyone in the distorted cave?"

The man's gaze weld to two blue sapphires for an instant. It wasn't much of an encounter of the third kind, just a weird stranger. His glare was straight, locked. His eyelids parted ways so hardly his eyelashes pushed the sides of his eyes. Silence fell like a rock in a still lake.

Arthur stood up abruptly and hid the fading light of the sun from the man, he towered above him, observing how the particles affected the man and his outfit.

Walking on his hands to back off a little, the soldier stuttered, as if he had been questioned.

"I-I'm asking because it's the p-procedure."

Arthur was staring so intensely that he managed to make the man believe it was possible to read one's mind. It was an invasive, communicative madness that tried to gnash at his thoughts, to enter his head. His pupils were still trying to calibrate to the light nurturing the world, he couldn't tell how much time he wandered in the cave however the difficulties he had to focus told a lot on his new handicap.

It was all gone, all the ache from his head trauma, his muscle soreness, and the fragility of his poor heart he pushed to its limits. Alas, by investigating his body he discovered an unbalance.

The dull sensation of satiety he had was turning into a rampaging hunger. However now that he was out of danger, out of the black trap, he couldn't let his mind venture on cannibalism anymore.

He repressed the idea by biting the middle articulation of his right index, his cheeks couldn't decide whether to paint a smile or grief on his face.

"I succeeded." He said, finding out his voice was raspy, so hoarse the barbarian understood what he needed.

If he was to take a bath, he would drink half of it.

The barbarian reached out to him, asking for help to get up with a surprised look, the only way for his brain to defend against the unknown threat. "Well congratulations, I guess."

They hooked each other's wrists and pushed on their feet. Unexpectedly, Arthur helped the man dust off the few pebbles that entered his clothes.

"The name's Fedlimid." The barbarian blurted out, feeling uncomfortable to be exposed to such a degree of intimacy with the naked stranger. Since he was about to fill out dozens of paperwork for finding another survivor of the distorted cave, he would have to ask a hundred more questions that would help ease its exploration, so he decided to make acquaintances.

In a blink, all of the reasons that pushed the boy to look for the fabled treasure surged from the depths of his mind, triggering another hypnotizing glare as he adjusted their grip in a handshake.

"Nice to meet you Fedlimid. I, am Arthur Aethersworn, prince of the Tashran kingdom and I require your escort to the capital at once."

He was solemn, dead serious, but with each word he pronounced, he saw the man's friendly smile growing to the point it reached his ears.

Arthur received a violent yet playful slap on his back, engraving a red mark on his pale skin. The man's ferocious laugh reached the forest beneath the camp, he wiped a tear under his eyes before calming down his everlasting gale of laugh.

"Man! I had crazy ones, but this takes the cake!"

There was no one to believe him. No proof to offer. Fedlimid used their handshake to drag the boy down the slope, toward the camp in a hastened pace.

Now that he felt gifted with the world's second nature, Arthur tried to interact with the magicules, to lift rocks or dirt and anchor his feet to the ground, just so he could be the one leading the way anew.

He could see the magicules react to his will, they trembled and oscillated until they became indistinguishable. He became absent-minded to the little alchemy happening in between his fingers but his focus was broken by the barbarian woman's comment.

"You're getting slow at this Fed!"

He lost track of time again and they had already made the first steps in between the tents.