The central hold of the Gestalt guild lay in a remote place outside the bounds of any cities and villages. John and his little group had to go hiking through one of Alabama’s many forests to get to their goal. “Makes you wonder how many Bigfoot sightings are based on someone stepping out of a barrier,” John remarked at some point.

“Doesn’t the curly-hair-bitch make sure people AREN’T surprised when somebody gets out of a barrier?” Eliza asked. “Because if she wasn’t, I’m VERY sure we’d have to deal with a load of bullshit every time you get out of the Guild Hall.”

“Hmm, true… might just be regular kookiness then?” the Gamer thought out loud. “Difficult to say. Knowing that the Abyss exists, I automatically try to tangle everything that was previously inexplicable with it, but maybe some people just believe in nonsense.”

Rave let out a drawn-out sigh. “We’re currently heading up a hill because some people thought they had to fuse their minds together in the middle of nowhere.”

“A phenomenon that spread remarkably quickly,” John pointed out. “Makes me wonder about the state of affairs in this area before the Gestalt guilds came around. Did they hijack a centralized organization or did their shared characteristics allow them to just roll over other small fry in the area?”

“Mother Chaos, bless me with a king that wonders about less things,” Metra grumbled.

“Your Mother Chaos might be part of the reason why we’re in this mess,” John told her.

“Still thinking she and the Lorylim are tangled up in some way?” the First of Wrath asked. “I’m telling you, I watched Gaia herself make Tiamat disappear. She stopped being, from one moment to the next.”

“I just assemble the puzzle pieces in the way it makes the most sense.” John stepped around a particularly thick pine tree. Somehow, he managed to get part of the winter jacket he was wearing stuck on a branch. Even superhuman reflexes didn’t protect against the occasional malfunction in the human surroundings awareness software.

They may have been in the wilderness, but there was still a chance to run into other people. For that reason, they were all wearing passable cold weather hiking clothes. “Maybe you should think more about where you are going than what might be behind the secrets of the universe,” Metra joked.

“I can usually do both,” John grumbled, as they continued on their trail. Tiamat being connected to the Lorylim was just one theory he currently had about what exactly they were. While being the most functional one, it also failed to cover everything. “Alright, I think we’ve arrived.”

The forest opened into a sizable clearing, dominated by a lake. The shores showed light signs of human influence. Black spots in circles of stone showed where campfires had been and some minor litter, glass bottles primarily, stuck out between the mossy stones and patchy grass around the shore. It appeared some people had chosen this place for a yearly get together with nature.

A stark contrast to what the group saw inside the Protected Space.

A tall building stood in the middle of the lake, four arms extending from a towering middle segment into the lake and four bridges between them connecting the centre with the shore. Its shape with all of the angles and edges reminded John of uncreative builds in Minecraft. An impression only fortified by its boring, grey colour – raw concrete only interrupted by a couple of square windows.

Eliza wretched. “Fucking collectivist shitheads, one like the other.”

‘I guess she sees more of communism in the architecture,’ John thought, while inspecting the building further. The four arms of it ended in some kind of pump, likely with the purpose of extracting the Sands of Time from the lake. At the moment, they lay inactive. There was no movement or light behind the glass. “I’ll go ahead, follow me at some distance,” the Gamer said, aiming his steps at the nearest bridge.

He was barely halfway past the bridge when he heard the giggles eliminate the complete silence. Teeth-clacking giggles from inhuman throats, competing with each other in an anticipating rise. They came from within the building. The volume grew the closer the group came, the creatures inside evidently unconcerned with hiding their presence.

They reached a wide-open door at the end of the bridge and then the laughter stopped. “John,” he heard his girlfriend’s voice behind him.

“Yeah?” he asked and turned around. Rave was right behind him, raising her hand and touching the side of his face. A skittering, warm feeling filled with desire for his flesh. A second hand slithered under his sleeve and melded with the scars. The blue glow of Particle Skin accompanied Eliza’s foot turning the blob of melded meat into a spray of gore that went flying off the bridge and stuck to one of the pumps.

“John… John…” The voice of Rave was now gargled and mocking. Then it laughed. Laughed and laughed, teeths and mushroom-like gills bubbling out from the fat and the exposed muscle, while the chunks dripped into the lake. “Kill me, kill me, kill me,” it demanded, while its brethren inside resumed their own laughter. A disgusting beat of snapping bones and squelching flesh accompanied the ecstatic joy.

John backed up and looked around, trying his best to ignore the scratching on the bones of his arm.

‘It didn’t move at all? Corruption Resistance 1 must be doing its work,’ he wondered, while trying to find where that singular Lorylim had come from. He looked up the walls, but found nothing. “Maybe that one was apt at invisibility?” he theorized out loud.

“Fantastic, invisible disgust thingies,” Rave grumbled.

“Yes…” John sighed, almost wanting to suggest they went outside and waited for him. It wouldn’t have been the first time that he made that point, but his girls were stubborn. As much as he wanted to protect them, so too did they want to protect him. If he had begged for them to let him do this on his own, they would have refused. “I’ll be relying on you, Nia,” the Gamer said. When it came to keeping everyone corruption free, the pariah was their only way.

With sharp blue eyes focused on their surroundings, the blonde nodded and followed him, along with everyone else, inside.

The building had been hollowed out. Inner walls and floors had been torn down completely, the concrete shredded into mostly tiny chunks that were glued back together by a black, gooey substance and made into chambers that covered the walls. John would have loved to call it a beehive, but that would have implied the orderliness of such. Instead he was faced with a disorderly assortment of holes that seemed as if maggots had emerged from the walls. The misshapen meat that once had been humans writhing within like oversized grubs certainly didn’t help.

What wasn’t covered in the hive was covered in a mixture of the black fluid, teeth, thin membranes and human remains. Human brains had been separated out, brain matter unfolded, and turned into the centres from which black roots and eyes formed and gills and fungal stalks grew.

In the middle of it at all was a creation that didn’t fit into the chaos. Orderly chunks of concrete had been aligned like the benches of a church, directed towards an altar with a throne. On top of that sat a single body, a large cap extending upwards and connecting its head to the remaining structure.

The laughter stopped.

“Come now, come, John, let us talk,” a calm voice beckoned and the figure on the throne raised a hand. “I haven’t had a single mind in ages. Talk. Talk to me.”

Now feeling a natural kind of itching from his disgust response, John dug the nails of his right hand into his palm. The light pain helped him blend out the mild trypophobia, as he waited for Nia to follow him. She was the centre of their group and, as they advanced, her presence made the Lorylim roots covering the floor recede, avoiding her otherworldly influence.

“We should just burn all of this shit,” Salamander growled.

“We should,” John agreed, but still kept on walking, “but we need to learn more about them. You all stay ready while I indulge this thing’s wish.”

They arrived between the first rows of the clean concrete. Human skeletons sat orderly on the benches. Their skulls were broken in such a fashion that it betrayed that something had burrowed out of their brains. Only a singular, diamond-shaped hole was out of the ordinary. Not only for its shape, but also for the consistent location at the front.

The Lorylim on the throne did not share that same mark. It couldn’t have, as the upper half of its head no longer existed. It had all been torn apart by the network of tendrils and gills that had, probably, once been the brain of the host. A small part of the nose remained, as did the mouth, albeit the Lorylim had long since gnawed its own lips off, leaving only tattered drapes of dried out meat to partly cover blank white teeth.

John grit his teeth, suppressing the hatred he felt for this Lorylim in particular. “You again,” he spat out, “Izha.”

“Izhaaaaaa,” the creature tasted its own name. “I’m so lucid right now, I almost expected you to use my original name. How odd, how odd indeed. I’m uninterrupted, I’m in control, I’m me. I will continue to be me even after I am no longer uninterrupted. Ask your questions, ask them.”

“What are you?”

“What am I… what a difficult question, so difficult indeed… so difficult that I cannot answer it,” Izha’s Honesty spoke, his voice unnervingly serene. “You will need to be more specific. Tell me what you want to know. What you, above all else, want to know. I know. I know you want to know.”

John looked at the thing on the throne before him. At the tendrils that penetrated dead flesh and crawled over the concrete. At the burst skull. At the naked chest and exposed ribs, which were stretched by gills that breathed out spores steadily. The question he needed to ask was disgusting in its implications. “Were you originally a human?”

“Yes and part of me still is.”

The binary on the past Observe sheet had spelled it out before, but hearing that clear answer from that thing made things concrete that John did not want to be. Of all the things he had watched humans become, all the dark acts and forms they took, he had hoped it would stop somewhere. Izha’s existence proved otherwise. “And you did so out of your own volition?”

“I discovered the truth. Gaia. The world. The rules. There was no choice but to open my eyes to the one path.”

“And what is that one path?” John asked, glancing at the nightmare around them. The grubs of flesh writhed in their chambers and looked down below with draconic maws, salivating wildly. “Consume everything?”

“You are not looking low enough.” Izha’s serenity was broken with amusement.

“Then is it to give you a new body?”

“You are not looking low enough,” Izha giggled.

“Do you want me to be your host?”

“You are not looking low enough!” Izha laughed and his words repeated from the many mouths in the hive. “”What is the sense in anything? There is none. There is absolutely nothing. Where there is no sense, there is no reason. There is no difference between me destroying everything and everything continuing as is. Guilty or innocent are descriptions of the same thing. Let’s devour gods, humans and monsters alike, all deserve it for being in this world. Look at the lowest point and find disappointment still.””

The answer was so simple and yet silenced the Gamer in its honest maliciousness. What was the great reason of Lorylim to act? Ultimately, there was none. At least for what the consciousness of Izha planned, it all stemmed from raw nihilism. Hurting was in and of itself the goal. A mindless pursuit of dragging everyone else into the darkness that Izha himself had come to embody.

“What are the Lorylim?” John asked. Laughter all across the room swelled. “Answer me!” the Gamer demanded, wanting to solve what he could while this aspect of the fallen man sat before him. “What are you now? What are you part of?”

“The first foe,” Izha answered, once again clear and calm of tone, even if the laughter continued beyond his own words. “That which humanity faced first. That which murdered the tribe of Remus and Romulus. Ah, the hatred of the brothers. Endless, dangerous – delicious. You will suffer like they suffer. You will see things our way, after you did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Many things, many things beyond me. The ancient and the first, they intertwine and pull, vie for control of the slaughtered masses. Only one of us worked for them. Albeit, that doesn’t deserve anything.” Izha rolled his head, the many tendrils stretching. “One. You get one more question, John. Ask wisely. Clarity like this does not come to me.”

“IT IS BOUGHT!” a voice shouted from above.

“With blood and bone and death.”

A number of questions raced through John’s head. He could have dug more on the origin of the Lorylim or Izha’s position in it. Perhaps he should have asked about the Death Zone and whether or not they were involved in it. Jackal’s location would have been good to know. His theory on Tiamat would have benefited from evidence. However, there was one question, above all others, that he wanted an answer too.

“Tell me then, Izha’s Honesty, how can I eliminate the Lorylim once and for all?”

“Two ways lead you to your goal,” Izha said and a single block of concrete fell down from above. More followed, as the black liquid above rescinded, unbinding the solid materials. It rained pebbles as the Lorylim shifted out of this plane of existence. “The rules of all life apply to us. Make us spend more energy than we absorb and we shall eventually fade. A difficult and long task, for we have the power of a people as our base.” Before John’s eyes, the Lorylim withered, turning more and more into a simple dried, if severely mishandled, corpse. “Our power can be concentrated, however. If you were to find one host that could bundle all of the power at once and purged them from existence, so too would we vanish. Two ways lead you to your goal. We fear neither of them.”