The first sign wasn't pain it was the absence of it.Aloysius blinked, still kneeling in the cooling glass where the rift had been, waiting for the familiar weight of exhaustion to crush him. It didn't come. Instead, there was a slow, deliberate pulse in his chest too steady to be a heartbeat, too cold to be life.
Then he heard it.
You saved them… but what about the others?
The voice wasn't the god-spark. This one slid into his mind like a blade through silk gentle, intimate, but sharpened with an edge that promised ruin.
"I didn't call for you," Aloysius muttered, forcing himself to stand. His sword felt heavy, but not because of fatigue it was the way the metal vibrated, as if something inside him was resonating with it.
You sealed the door, the voice continued, but you left the key inside yourself.
A cold dread settled in his gut. The hunger he had felt from the breach was still there only now, it wasn't reaching for him from the outside. It was coiled within his veins, testing its new prison.
Aloysius staggered forward. The battlefield lay silent. No allies. No enemies. Just scorched land and fragments of the creature's crystalized remains.
He caught his reflection in one shard. His eyes were wrong no longer fully golden, but ringed with an inky black flame that seemed to flicker inward instead of out.
I can give you the strength you lost, the voice purred. And more. Enough to erase every threat before it can even rise.
He clenched his fists. "And the price?"
A pause.You will not notice the cost until it is far too late to care.
Somewhere deep inside, Aloysius realized this was no longer a battle against some monstrous force in another realm. This was going to be a war within himself one he could never afford to lose.
The wind shifted. Somewhere far off, he heard the sound of steel meeting steel, the clash of warriors. Trouble was already stirring again.
And for the first time, Aloysius wasn't sure whether the voice in his head wanted to help him stop it… or wanted to win it for itself.