He wondered if the reel of history would ever run out of monsters. Or perhaps, in a thousand years, he would look at a crab-man, and see only a neighbor.

  Before him—through the shared eyes of the tar that now lined the lakebed—stood an army of nightmares.

  They were massed on the shore of a sunless sea, their carapaces gleaming in the faint bioluminescence of the cavern moss. They were Curtlers.?

  The name came to him from the Mist, plucked from the minds of the first few scouts the tar had consumed. A common race in the multiverse, but here, in this sealed bottle of a world, they were kings.

  They stood three feet tall on average, but their bulk was deceptive. Their bodies were armored tanks of chitin, supported by six scuttling legs. Their primary arms ended in pincers the size of anvils, capable of shearing through bone and steel alike.

  And behind them, cowering in the shadows, were the Golsers.

  Fish-folk. "Working-Food" in the brutal, pragmatic tongue of their masters.

  They were pathetic things, barely two feet high, with long arms, bent legs and wide, webbed feet that slapped wetly against the stone. Their gold scales—gold, in a world without light—shimmered as they huddled together, their bulbous eyes wide with a terror they had known since birth.

  In the center of the formation stood Sharlone.

  The Mist whispered his titles: Hardest-Shell. Great-One. Breaker. Unifier.

  He was colossal. Triple the size of a man, his shell a fortress of scars and mineral growths, a living map of battles fought in the dark. His pincers were siege weapons, and his eyes black pits of absolute confidence.

  He did not fear the mist.

  Why should he? In this chasm, he was god. He had never seen the sky, seen a Dragon, or the killing tide of metal monstrosities.

  He snapped his pincers—CLACK-CLACK—a sound like gunshots in the enclosed space. His warriors mimicked him, a rhythmic, deafening percussion that was meant to terrify rivals.

  ‘It would work on a Golser,’ Amon thought, watching from the safety of the deep earth. ‘It might even work on a man with a spear.’

  But the Mist was not a man.

  Advance.

  The command was a ripple in the water.

  The Mist rolled over the lake, a silent, gray tsunami. Beneath the surface, the tar surged forward, no longer hiding in the muck, but rising like an oil slick, shaping itself into aquatic nightmares, sharks of black glass, eels of liquid shadow.

  The Curtlers held the line.

  They were brave, Amon gave them that. They locked their pincers together, forming a wall of living chitin. They waited for the enemy to crash against them, to be crushed and broken like everything else in their world.

  The Mist hit them, and flowed through their shell-wall, filling the gaps, curling around their legs. It entered their spiracles, and filled their lungs.

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  The rhythmic clacking faltered.

  One by one, the warriors slumped, their pincers loosening, and legs buckling. The dream took them, heavy and sweet, dragging them down into the silt.

  Sharlone roared.

  It was a gurgling, furious sound. He snapped at the fog, his massive claws shearing through the air. He didn't understand that he couldn't crush it, nor kill it.

  He was fighting a ghost.

  And then, he did something impossible.

  The Mist recoiled.

  Amon blinked in the dark.

  Magic.

  Sharlone raised a claw. Dark, purple symbols etched themselves into the air around him. They weren't spoken; they were willed.

  Lexemes.?

  Amon recognized them instantly. They were crude, raw, and powered by the sheer force of a Tier 2 Core that had lived too long, and fought too hard.?

  Dissolution. Rot. Void.

  Two beams of purple light shot from his claws, slamming into the Mist.

  The fog burned, and in Amon’s mind, he heard the blessing hiss.

  Sharlone, blind, and choking on the fog, poured his Soul into the curse. He fired again and again, burning holes in the encroaching white.

  He has lived a hundred lives, the Mist whispered. For this realm, He is old, and strong.

  Amon felt a spark of something he hadn't felt in a long time.

  Respect.

  This wasn't a mindless beast. This was a king, a sorcerer, and survivor.

  ‘But he is alone.’

  The Mist adapted, stopping its mere attempts to drown him, and activity moved to fight.

  It swirled around the beams, countering the mana, draining the curse before it could land. Sharlone fired again, but the beams were weaker now. Flickering.

  He was running out of power.

  He roared again, a challenge to the void.

  “Face me!”

  The request was granted.

  A Caregiver rose from the water. A massive wolf of tar and bone, slick and terrifying. It didn't hesitate, it surged, and slammed into Sharlone with the force of a battering ram.

  The king’s staggered, but his shell held, and his protection spell—a shimmering barrier of force—flared.

  But the tar didn't strike, it flowed over the barrier, encasing Sharlone’s shell in black, and filled the joints of his armor, freezing his limbs. He struggled, and fought with a fury that shook the cavern floor, but he was fighting the ocean.

  Slowly, agonizingly, the great king fell.

  The tar pinned him to the ground, seeped into his shell, and touched his mind.

  ‘Sleep,’ Amon commanded.

  Sharlone raged against the end.

  ‘I am not cattle!’ the thought screamed across the link, raw and defiant. ‘I am the Breaker! I choose death!’

  ‘You choose nothing,’ Amon thought back, sad but firm. ‘You are saved.’

  The dream took him.

  The resistance shattered, the purple light faded. The cavern fell silent, save for the soft weeping of the Golsers as they, too, were pulled into the dark.

  Amon sat back in his stone chair, his armored hands resting on his knees. He looked at the mask he had been carving, a dragon.

  He felt the heavy, resentful presence of Sharlone’s soul settling into the Garden. It didn't blend in; it burned like a coal in a snowdrift.

  ‘Did you think I would fall for an illusion?’ Echoed Sharlone’s heated, and seething thought. The Soul aware, but trapped within his own body, and being pulled deeper into the mist.

  Amon set aside the dragon, and picked up a fresh slab of stone.

  He began to carve a crab.

  "Finally," he whispered to Arbah, who was watching him with her coal eyes.

  "Someone who fights."

  Amon smiled.

  ‘Welcome home, King.’