Chapter 87 – The Edge of Himself
The pain didn't stop If anything, it got worse.
John knelt in the grass, blood leaking from his nose, ears, and eyes, his hand still impaled by the snake's fangs. The invisible pressure from above hadn't eased; it kept grinding down, relentless, like a mountain slowly deciding to crush whatever dared stand on it.
His bones creaked.
His lungs burned.
His light was barely holding its shape.
Every breath was borrowed.
Alaric's voice cut through the storm in John's head, sharp as a blade.
"You're at your limit."
John tried to answer. His tongue felt like sand. His jaw wouldn't move.
The poison from the snake was everywhere now—not moving through his body, but owning it. His veins felt like they'd been filled with molten glass. Every heartbeat pumped fire into his muscles. His heart pounded a wild rhythm against his ribs, as if it wanted to tear itself out.
The guardian watched.
It hadn't spoken since it cast the test. It stood at the far end of the lake like a statue of fur and stone, eyes half-lidded, arms hanging loosely at its sides.
To it, John wasn't a person.
He was a passing curiosity.
"You must focus on cultivating!" Alaric snapped.
"I'm… trying…" The thought barely formed in his head.
He did what he could. He reached inward, dragging on his light, forcing it to circulate. Threads of golden energy crawled through his channels, scorching a path through the poison. For a moment, they pushed it back, burning a sliver of clarity into his nerves.
His breath came easier.
Then the pressure doubled.
The invisible weight shoved him back into the ground, shoving the bones of his spine toward the earth. His vision flared white, then black. His heartbeat stuttered—once, twice—as though it wasn't sure it wanted to keep going.
His light faltered.
"He's increasing it," Alaric said, voice tight. "He's pushing you to the edge. This is the real test."
John couldn't even curse.
The poison rushed back, swarming into every space his light had cleared. His body trembled, spasms running up his arms, across his chest. His organs felt like they were boiling.
Something deep inside him shivered.
His heart… skipped.
Then beat again.
But it wasn't the same beat.
It echoed. Deep. Too deep. Like there was a second heart buried beneath his own, waking up.
The next pulse hit like a hammer.
WHUD.
His blood surged. His skin burned cold. For one dizzy instant, the poison stopped hurting.
That scared him more than the pain.
"No," Alaric said at once. "Don't you dare."
John didn't have a choice.
The Eclipse Heart moved on its own.
The world sharpened.
With clarity so intense it almost hurt.
His senses flared outward. The weight pressing down from above became… precise. He could feel the exact shape of the pressure, its edges, its depth. Every grain of energy pushing on his bones.
The poison shifted.
Instead of boiling aimlessly, it began to swarm toward his chest in pulsing waves, as if something was calling it. His veins burned black for a heartbeat, energy whipping through them like a storm funneling toward a single point.
Then the Eclipse Heart overpowered him.
WHUD.
A low, deep beat shook his ribs from the inside. The pressure above him stuttered. Not gone—but his body no longer splintered under it. His muscles stopped shredding. His bones stopped cracking.
The poison… slowed. Then rotated.
It started cycling.
John's fingers twisted in the grass.
"No…" The thought scraped across his mind like rust. "No, no, no—"
"John," Alaric's voice came, low and urgent. "Listen to me very carefully. Do not let go of yourself. The Heart is trying to take the reins completely."
"I'm… trying," John thought back.
But something else was, too.
The Eclipse Heart pulsed again. This time, John felt the echo of it outside his chest—just for a second. The grass around him darkened, the air itself thickening, like a film of shadow had been laid over reality.
The poison flowed faster now, whipped into a perfect cycle.
It hurt less.
His limbs responded again.
His lungs could fill.
And with the pain receding, another sensation slid in to take its place:
Hunger.
Not for food.
Not for light. But a hunger For violence.
His thoughts sharpened into knives.
I could tear this place apart.
I could drown this whole valley in fire and shadow—
The idea felt… good.
"John!" Alaric's voice slammed into him like a shock. "Focus on who you are."
The guardian finally tilted its massive head.
Its golden eyes narrowed slightly as it watched the black-tinged aura curl around John's kneeling form.
"Ah," it rumbled, amusement threading its tone for the first time. "There it is."
The pressure didn't lift.
If anything, the guardian pushed a little harder. The invisible weight slammed down over John's skull like a divine hand, testing the limits of his reinforced body.
But the Eclipse Heart met it.
Its next beat sent a wave through his bones, bracing his spine, hardening his muscles. His aura flared outward, a swirling mix of gold and gray. The light tried to radiate; the darkness tried to twist.
They clashed where they met, hissing.
The poison inside him thinned—not gone, but forced into a tight, controllable circuit that the Heart used like fuel.
"The hearts using the poison for fuel," Alaric said quietly.
John squeezed his eyes shut.
The thoughts coming now weren't normal. They weren't his usual stubborn, tired, sarcastic self. They were sharp, eager, vicious.
Who cares if this is a test?
His lips curled into a grin before he realized it.
That frightened him.
"Stop," he snarled inwardly—, at the ugly voice twining through his thoughts. "You don't get to decide."
The Heart responded with a pulse of power—another deep, slow thud that shook his chest. His fingers dug into the dirt as the world tilted.
WHUD.
His vision flickered black at the edges.
He could feel it.
The Heart liked this.
It liked the pressure.
The poison.
The edge of death.
It was stretching against its invisible cage, testing how far it could push into him before something broke.
His soul-core—a condensed sphere of light at the center of his being—was no longer pure white-gold. Cracks of smoky gray laced through it, faint but growing.
The Eclipse Heart pulsed just beneath it, deeper in the dark, sending up threads of shadow to wrap around the base of his core.
His light flickered.
The Heart squeezed.
His soul-core shuddered, its glow dimming as the shadows bit deeper.
"See it?" Alaric said. "That's the problem. You must control the heart before it's too late"
John snarled.
He didn't have breath to spare, but rage didn't need breath.
His heart—beat faster beneath the monstrous rhythm of the Eclipse. His light flared once more, weak but stubborn. He grabbed onto it mentally and pulled.
The shadows burned his hands as he seized them.
They tried to coil up his arms, to sink into his chest. He forced them down, shoving them away from his core, pressing them back toward the deeper place they'd come from.
The Heart resisted.
Its next beat was a threat.
WHUD.
Pain ripped through him, starting from his chest and shooting out through every nerve. His spine arched. His head snapped back. The lake, the trees, the waterfall—all of it blurred as his body fought itself.
"Don't let it control you!" Alaric barked "Just bind it! Pull your light around it like chains!"
Fine.
He imagined his light as he'd always cultivated it—runes, lines, circuits. He forced them into shape around the dark core beneath his soul-core, not to erase it, but to wrap it.
One loop.
Then another.
Then another.
Every band burned him.
The Heart pushed back, angry now, thrumming dark intent against his restraints. Images flashed at the edges of his mind—cities burning, blood on his hands, Tamara's eyes gone empty, Ember's light snuffed out.
All so easy.
All so vivid.
He gritted his teeth and snarled into the void, voice cracking.
"NO."
His light constricted.
The chains tightened.
The Heart pounded once more, furious—
WHUD.
—then went quiet.
Not gone.
Not weak.
Just… still.
Like an animal returned to its den, forced to wait.
John's entire body sagged.
The mix of gold and gray around him thinned. The pressure from above pressed in one more time—
—and this time, it met nothing but his own reinforced will.
It still hurt.
It still crushed.
But now, the power letting him endure wasn't the Heart forcing his body to survive.
It was him.
His soul-core pulsed, steady and bright, with only faint grey lines left laced through it—marks of the battle, not proof of defeat.
Alaric exhaled slowly, sounding, for once, genuinely relieved.
"Good," he said quietly. "You chose right. You used it. You didn't let it use you."
The guardian's eyes narrowed.
The pressure finally eased.
The invisible weight dissolved like fog under a rising sun. One moment, John's bones screamed; the next, they were his again.
He slumped forward, catching himself with one hand. The snake hanging from the back of it crumbled into ash, its work done. The poison in his veins thinned to a dull ache.
The fake sun brightened overhead. The waterfall returned to the simple sound of falling water. The air felt lighter.
He realized he was still breathing.
Barely. But still.
Ember peeled away from his chest with a soft, gasping noise, stumbling onto the grass beside him. The little beast shook once, then twice, fur puffing up as his own aura slowly steadied.
John laughed once—just a short, broken sound—as blood dripped from his chin.
He wasn't okay.
But he was alive.
The guardian studied him in silence for a long moment. Then, finally, it straightened, shoulders rolling like shifting stone.
"You did not crumble," it rumbled. "You did not surrender entirely to the curse, either."
Its golden eyes gleamed with a faint new light—not respect, not exactly, but interest.
"Few can walk that edge and return to themselves."
It turned away, already losing interest. Its massive form padded toward the waterfall, each step rippling the surface of the lake.
"The Power of Will is not endurance alone," it said, not looking back. "It is the ability to remain yourself when power tries to control you."
It paused at the base of the falls, water misting around its form.
"You have passed. Continue if you wish."
Then it stepped into the waterfall and faded, its body dissolving into the cascade until only water remained.
The pressure was gone.
The guardian was gone.
Only John remained.
He rolled onto his back.
The sky above the dome was still a soft, impossible blue. The artificial sun drifted lazily overhead. Birds that weren't real sang from branches that were part illusion, part memory.
He lay in the middle of it all in a puddle of his own blood, chest heaving, limbs shaking.
Every part of him hurt. Muscles, bones, nerves… even his soul hurt.
But beneath all that pain lay something else.
A quiet understanding:
He'd survived because he'd used the Heart.
He'd remained himself because he'd chained it.
For now.
"You see it, don't you," Alaric said softly.
John stared up at the sky, vision blurring around the sun.
"Yeah," he rasped. His voice sounded wrong—raw, like it had scraped over broken glass on the way out. "Ticking time bomb."
"Yes," Alaric said. "And every time you let it out… it ticks faster."
A breathy, humorless sound escaped John's throat.
"Story of my life."
He let his head loll to the side. Ember had curled up against his arm again, eyes closed, chest rising and falling in quick, shallow breaths. The beast's little paws were stained red where they touched John's blood.
Guilt pricked him.
He'd dragged all of them into this.
The city.
The pyramid.
This realm.
He closed his eyes.
For a moment, there was nothing. No pressure. No poison. No guardian. Just his own heartbeat and the faint, steady thrum of the thing beneath it.
His lips twitched.
A sound started low in his chest—too soft to be a laugh at first. Just a broken exhale, half sigh, half exasperation.
Then it grew.
His shoulders shook.
Not with sobs.
With laughter.
It rolled out of him, rough and cracked, scraping past his torn throat. It wasn't wild. It wasn't bright. It was dark—quietly vicious, like the exhausted chuckle of someone who'd been pushed too far and found something funny in the horror of it all.
He laughed at the test.
At the guardian.
At himself.
At the fact that he'd nearly died, nearly lost himself, just to prove he could stay who he was for a little longer.
The sound deepened, turning low, almost predatory. Ember's ears flattened; the little beast opened his eyes and watched him warily.
For a heartbeat, something in that laugh didn't sound like John at all.
Then, slowly, it faded.
His breathing evened out. The tension drained from his jaw. The faint black ring creeping at the edge of his irises retreated, leaving only weary gold.
"John," Alaric said quietly.
"Yeah?"
"Don't get used to that feeling."
John swallowed, staring up at the false sky.
"I won't," he whispered.
Then, after a beat, more honestly:
"I'll try not to."
His eyes slid closed at last.
In the garden at the heart of an impossible pyramid, John lay in the shadow of his own blood, the aftermath of a test that had forced him to bend without breaking.
Deep inside his chest, far beneath bone and light, the Eclipse Heart pulsed once—
WHUD.
—then went still again.