Ezthamic's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

The passage past the flower chamber opened into a wider room. Ezthamic stepped through with half the mask in his fist. He needed the second piece. Without it, the warning in the memory stayed broken. He could not know what had finished him before, or how to stop it finding him again. Black flesh covered the walls here. Thousands of trapped faces pressed through the skin, mouths open, eyes blind. Many of the faces were his own. At the room's center, a vast pit yawned in the floor. A man stood at the pit's edge, guarding something cradled in his hand. He had Ezthamic's face. He had the same dreadlocks, but scars crossed his skin, and one arm had hardened into a living blade. Black bone armored his chest. Ezthamic knew him from the bloom. This was himself from a life centuries gone. The older man held out his hand. In his palm sat the missing half of the mask. "You want this," Past Ezthamic said. His red eyes were steady. "Take it, and you'll understand. Understanding is how it starts." "Tell me what finished me," Ezthamic said. "You already know." The older man nodded at the pit. "It waits in there. Every time." Something moved in the dark below. A shape pulled itself up over the lip of the pit. It was large, built from shifting black flesh and bare bone. When its blind eyes found Ezthamic, its body began to change. Its skin rippled. Its face stretched and reshaped. Slowly it grew Ezthamic's features, copying him line by line. The thing from the warning wore his face now. It reached toward the mask fragment in the older man's hand. Ezthamic lunged. He grabbed the fragment before the creature could. The two halves of the mask snapped together in his grip. The seam sealed with a sound like breaking ice. Light burst from the joined relic. The room fell away. A great black flower opened in his mind, its clear petals glowing. Each petal held a different man. Each man had his face. One stood in a burning city. One knelt before a crowned figure. One led armies of the dead across a field of ribs. Dozens of lives, dozens of worlds, all of them him. All of them wearing the whole mask. All of them ending the same way. He saw the truth the warning had hidden. The mask did not protect him. It woke the thing inside him. Every time he remembered who he was, he became something that destroyed the world around him. The vision tore loose. Ezthamic screamed. His skin split along his arms. Black bone forced its way up through the tears and hardened into plates. His eyes burned crimson. Four skeletal arms ripped from his back and spread wide. One hand grew a long fang of bone. Another swelled into a massive claw. Dark veins spread across his body like roots. He was no longer the wanderer. He was the end of the warning, the shape all his lives had come to. Past Ezthamic stepped back. The hardened man who feared nothing stared with real terror. "No," he whispered. "Not that form. I hoped you would break the cycle. I was wrong." He raised his blade arm, then lowered it. There was no fighting what Ezthamic had become. The trapped faces in the walls began to scream without sound. The pit shook. Then the vision collapsed inward, pulling at Ezthamic from every side. He understood the last piece. These memories were a trap. Nekura kept him alive across lifetimes only to use this form again. The land did not need him to find himself. It needed him to remember. So he chose not to. With the mask whole in his monstrous claw, Ezthamic drove it down into the pit. The two halves split apart as they fell. The relic shattered against the dark. The faces in the walls went slack. The screaming stopped. The four skeletal arms crumbled from his back. The bone plates sloughed off his skin. His eyes faded from red to human. The transformation drained out of him, and he fell to his knees, a man again. Past Ezthamic was gone. The chamber was empty and still. Far above, through the structure at Nekura's heart, a single heartbeat sounded. It was not louder than before. It was weaker. Ezthamic had reached the thing that kept remembering him, and he had refused to be remembered. He stood, breathing hard, scarred but whole. The ancient heart of Nekura had wanted its weapon back. For the first time across all his lives, it did not get him. He turned from the broken pit and climbed toward the surface, carrying nothing, finally himself.