PAIN.
PAIN.
PAIN.
It devoured me whole—searing, suffocating, relentless. My nerves screamed, my skull felt as though it were splitting open, and every inch of my being drowned in torment. Thought itself became impossible; there was only the red tide of agony.
When sight finally returned, it came veiled in a blood-hazed blur. Shadows swam before me, shapes coalescing into eight hooded figures encircling me. Their robes were darker than night, their hands lifted in rigid supplication, lips twitching with silent incantations.
Summoners.
I had read enough, watched enough, played enough to recognize the ritual for what it was. They had dragged me here. And by the way their heads bowed, their whispers dripped, and the air thrummed with malice, I was eighty percent sure they hadn't gone through all this effort to crown me king.
Eighty percent. Ten percent for each hood, I thought bitterly. Which left me with a near certainty—they meant to bind me, to twist me into a slave.
The thought should have sparked rage, but the pain smothered everything.
Then sound rushed back like a floodgate torn open. A thunderous roar filled my skull, so violent I would have screamed if my jaw weren't locked in place by the spell. Instinctively I tried to move, but my wrists were lashed by vines—not real, but burning constructs of light. Thorned, root-like tendrils wrapped my limbs, chest, throat, squeezing until I could barely draw breath.
Claustrophobia hit me like a blade to the gut. I had always planned for every angle, every exit, every weakness. But now? No escape routes. No fallback plans. Just entrapment and suffocation.
I must not panic. I must not.
I forced myself to breathe, shallow and ragged, grounding myself in the pain. And in that focus, I felt it more clearly—five veins of power woven through my torment: fire, spirit, water, wind, earth. The drums had summoned them, the chants had bound them, and together they were shaping my prison.
One spell pulled me into this world.
Another shackled my body.
The third… reached deeper, clawing at my heart, my mind, my will.
They weren't just summoning me. They were attempting to overwrite me.
For a moment, horror and awe mingled inside me. If they succeeded, the Dark Lord would not rise here. A puppet would.
That was when I laughed.
It started low, trembling through clenched teeth. Then louder. Madder. A jagged, hysterical laugh that rattled from somewhere beyond sanity. The vines constricted in answer, their thorns biting deeper, feeding off resistance. Pain exploded—but still I laughed, louder and louder, the sound unhinged, reverberating in the chamber.
And in the middle of that madness, I heard it.
A whisper. Soft. Intimate. Everywhere and nowhere at once.
"You have to come and see me."
My laughter broke into a gasp. "What?"
"You have to come and see me."
The voice was neither male nor female, neither warm nor cruel. It simply was.
"Who are you?"
"You have to come and see me."
The words didn't change, but the weight behind them did. Urgent. Commanding. Inescapable.
"How?" I rasped.
And the world split.
The circle of hooded figures dissolved into smoke. The drums ceased. The ritual chamber evaporated. Pain and bindings remained, coiled tight around me, but the scene had shifted.
I stood in a vast throne room, walls of black stone swallowing the torchlight, shadows crawling like living things. At the far end, raised high above me, sat a throne—massive, cold, carved from the same abyssal stone.
And upon it, a figure. Shrouded. Indistinct.
"Welcome," the figure said, voice echoing through the void. "I've been waiting for you."