FSE

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Kalokin spent several hours alone in the dark car, thinking. Nikolak had returned to the city they'd just left... something about finding a horror movie for a quick snack, but he cared not; she'd be back before sunrise. It gave him a few hours of peace to do something he'd been putting off... thinking. He did not spend such a vast quantity of time brooding over one subject; rather, his mind was not limited by inefficient machinations of biological thought. Rather, he spent several hours thinking about everything that had happened over the past month. Every sight, every sound, every individual iota of data gleaned from the world at large, he'd kept in his short term memory, as was only right, seeing as 1 month was a short timespan, in his eyes at least. He knew of mortals who had developed a system of a mind castle, or memory map, tying ideas and memories to physical places, like parts of a bicycle or rooms in a house. He took such a organization to a higher level; he maintained a four-dimensional map of the world as he knew it, with three physical dimensions as expected, but a fourth dimension representing time. Travel through said 4th dimension was, of course, linear, but he could then step back and add events, memories gleaned from other people to better flesh out his knowledge of the entirety of mortal existence. His map was woefully incomplete; he could not be everywhere, and even his siblings had such imperfect memories, but this was his hobby. It brought him peace, to neatly categorize his memories in such a way, but more than that, it brought him the closest to feeling emotion that he could get without Fear's heart seeping outwards through his essence.

Once he'd neatly sorted all his memories into long-term storage, he pulled a few forwards. These memories existed along a fifth dimension, one bound by increments. This was for memories directly pulled from the souls of mortals, from their dreams. Specifically, Shouyousei's dreams.

He remembered a warm afternoon in a house filled with love. He'd approached carefully, quietly, so as not to disturb Shou's happy memory, but something had gone horribly wrong. Shou's mind had reacted as if it had come under attack; not at all an uncommon psychophysical response when first brushing souls with a deity, but what alarmed him was the speed and skill with which she'd subconsciously defended herself. He'd believed her possessed by a minor demon of some sort, and had needed to resort to force to break into her mind as he guided Nikolak forwards, but once they flooded through her soul, he found... nothing. Not even a ghost of a shadow as her trance shattered in the midst of Nikolak's essence transfer, literally the worst time for such an occurance.

He held tight to that moment in his mind, then dipped his toes into Shouyousei's mind. Normally, seeking through memories was impossible, but Shou was Niko's vessel, and Nikolak was his Soul. Through her, he could access Shou's mind, body, and soul, including an easy way into her memories, especailly with her asleep. He delved back into the past, returning unto the first day, that moment of binding in a house brightly lit even if only in her memories.

He looked through her eyes and felt with her hands, detesting the limited data she remembered. It felt like trying to solve mathematical equations without including the digit "3", but he made do. He collected her memories, what of them she remembered, then synchronized them with his along that fourth dimension time, then watched them unfold. Everything had gone wrong... She'd been open, happy, willing to let a stranger into her house, so to speak, but then in a moment, paranoia had shot through her. Everything went dark and spooky, and his knocks at the door aqcuired a slightly menacing lean, a violence he intentionally kept removed from his hand as he knocked politely.

There, Shou stood and turned towards the front door, but something was nagging at him. The walls were stained almost a different color, the windows blackened over with anxiety, it was almost a different house entirely.

A different house...

He turned back to Shou's mind and stuck both hands in, quickly finding an idylistic childhood memory from deep in her past; happy house, loving parents, and a quick check confirmed that this was the "happy place" her mind had defaulted to. He was missing something though... there was an itch in his mind, an itch he got when two memories of the same event didn't match up. It was an itch he encountered frequently when dealing with anything as fragile as a mortal's memory, but here it seemed important. He viewed the occurance purely from Shou's perspective again, detesting every moment as he drudged through time twice blind and half-numb, until he heard something he didn't remember.

He's lying.

It got his attention. He stepped a few paces back and listened closer attention. There were more words, but these had faded to nothingness as her memory lapsed, but he heard a voice as soft as velvet and twice as binding.

You are worth nothing to him.

Two sentances amidst at least half a dozen that she remembered, all words that had echoed up from within her own soul. Not from her subconscious, a subconscious was incapable of language. Then where...

He turned and looked at the door to the basement. Sure, the words hadn't literally echoed in a vertical direction, but mortals only ever buried their most hated filth or their most loved treasures.

He stared at the basement door for perhaps a second before superimposing Shou's memory of the basement door at her parents' house. They were similar... one had a knob, the other a handle. One was painted Optic White, the other Cloud white. Both were pine, a good, respectable wood, but they were absolutely different doors, and what he noticed first was that this one had a simple slide latch to lock the basement from the outside.

Backwards in the memory. Parents' door. Forwards into the dark fear. Different door. This specific door was significant, else Shou wouldn't have remembered it so vividly. He let the memory play slowly, from his Shou's perspective. She hadn't noticed it consciously, but the latch flipped up... slid... inched... unlocked the door. At that moment, everything had gone dark with fear.

Step back, play forwards, from his perspective... nothing. No magical interference, no wayward souls, not even so much as solar radiation affecting her at that moment. And yet, from her eyes, everything had changed.

From her eyes...

He stopped and stepped backwards, reaching for a more recent dream. A theater, a stage, two dancers, yes. He'd surveyed the length and breadth of her dream while Nikolak danced, but found nothing out of the ordinary. First-night performance anxiety, sure, but that never truly left a person. Stop, turn, and Shouyousei's perspective. From the beginning, everything seemed... distorted. Real, physical, but not at all normal. Hungry eyes watched from the audience, and something cold lurked in box five.

Stop. Step back. His memories revealed nothing in box five. He preferred seat thirteen himself, but box 5 was empty to him. Cold and dark as a ghost's breath.

Stop. Step back. A swift query had Nikolak's memories, and these he perused with great interest. They were identical to his, with the sole exception being that she too remembered something unsettling lurking in box five, but she hadn't mentioned it because, in her eyes, this was a nightmare. She expected horrors in the darkness.

Step forwards. Just before the dream destabilized, embedded crystal clear in Nikolak's memory.

She is mine.

A voice as soft as poison and twice as deadly.

A message directly to Fear. He pulled at a recent memory and played the two side by side.

He lies. You mean nothing to him.

She is mine.

It was undoubtedly the same voice. Both Shouyousei and Nikolak had heard it, and Kalokin hadn't. She hadn't believed his explanation of it being just a projection, and the memory was unusually sharp because of it, and now, he didn't believe himself either. There were exactly two possibilities; One, he simply hadn't noticed it, both times, which would be an alarming lack of clarity for him... or two, he was simply unable to detect it, an equally alarming idea.

Stop. Step back, back to the house and the basement. Kalokin looked through his eyes, and saw the door in Shou's house, a door from a happy childhood leading to an inconsequential basement.

Stop. Turn. Shou's eyes saw a door etched in darkness that chilled her to the bone.

Stop. Turn. Nikolak saw the same door as Shou had.

Stop.

Step back.

Step all the way back, out of his memories, out of introspection and back into the Aether.

He was dealing with some kind of intelligent entity that, for some reason, he couldn't see, or hear, or even detect the signs of his passing. Did it specifically exclude him? Or were Shou and Nikolak the only ones who could see it? Would Khaesho be able to? Shou was the first bipedal to be taken as a vessel, as far as he knew. Did that have a part to play in it? And Nikolak... this was the first time since Ghanyr that she'd taken a vessel, and Ghanyr was the first since the great war of rebirth. Would Shou end up like Ghanyr? He wanted to believe that Ghanyr was an isolated case, unique by some factor he didn't understand, even before he'd been patronized. That said, Niko had only taken two vessels, ever, and the odds of them both being that markedly unique without it being tied to Niko herself... the odds were slim... unless she was drawn to unusual and unique souls?

There were too many variables, too many unknowns. Even counting that Shou was the first bipedal vessel, there was something different about her, something off. Unbidden, his own words floated back to him from the first moment they'd caught a feeling of her aura.

Don't scare this one off, Khaesho. She's different.

But how was she different? He'd recognized it, could feel on a fundamental level that she wasn't like most others, but he lacked words for what it was. Why then? Why her, when so many others had found the mouth of their cave before? Why her, whose soul seemed to resonate with Nikolak's on so deep a level that it prevented her from resonating with him?

Too many variables, too many unknowns... best to keep it a secret. No need to alarm anyone until he knew more... keeping secrets was what he did best. That much, he remembered, even if nothing else. Secrets and debts... and a price to be paid. He whispered the words to himself, a soothing mantra in the dark.

"Everybody owes, and everybody pays."