“I remember bringing us here all the time.” Liv’s voice rings out from a colorful void. Deep blues fade into hot pinks which smear out into burning reds and blinding yellows. The colors blend and coalesce around and within each other. The visions they create shift and distort until the voice that cried out within is felt amongst the vibrant myriad of fervor and sentiment. “We’d spend eternity here; enveloped, connected, coupled by our very essence. Our souls joined in passion. We’d paint such beautiful pieces with ourselves as we became one. Surely you remember too.”

“Take me back, Liv.” Splotches of monotonic dull gray spread out through the mirage like spilled ink as Diego responds. 

“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO ADDRESS ME HERE, PARASITE!” Harsh, jagged streaks of red shoot out in a blitz. “NOR DO YOU HAVE PERMISSION TO USE THAT NAME!” 

“Well I’m not calling you Luxuria.” The gray blots permeate the red slashes. “I have a bar to manage, so please, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be taken back.”

In the center of it all, a pinprick hole tears itself apart. Purple tendrils swim out and coil around the other colors. 

“Now, now.” Zyth’s dark timbre slithers out and begins swirling around every corner of the colorful expanse. “Surely we can stay for just a moment. For old time’s sake, at least.”

Liv gasps. “My treasure!” Chains of blue and pink beeline towards the purple swirls and wrap around them, like filament coiling around a rod. “Oh, can’t you lock the vermin up? Look at how he taints our paradise.” 

“Would that I could, my nonpareil. My situation has taken a complicated turn.”

Their colors congeal in their own special corner of the void, leaving Diego’s grays floating in a void of pure nothing nearby. 

“He does not deserve the pleasure I give you here.” The blues and pinks become more vibrant. 

“Trust me,” The faintest, slightest, barest hue of green tinges the gray. “I want out as much as you want me out. Whatever you have to say to him, you can say in front of me. In fact, you have to.”

Just as faint -perhaps a notch less- as the green that spread over the gray, red begins to ever so slightly creep along the blues and pinks like veins in an arm.  

“I spoke to your mother.” A moment of silence is allowed for a response, but none arrives. “Your ajxthr is coming up. She wishes you the best of luck.”

Something quite bizarre happens next. Liv doesn’t notice. Diego, however, not only noticed, he felt it. When Zyth’s bright and vibrant purple tendrils dimmed and flickered for just short of a blink, he felt it. When the purple altogether vanished and its presence was pure and transparent for even less time, he felt it. 

It gives no response. Shortly after Liv draws a second breath, it disappears. 

“—OPEN IN TEN!” Georgie’s monstrous roar of a voice penetrates Diego’s eardrums and shakes him back to a more comfortable reality. 

His ears begin throbbing from the sudden attack on them. It’s no more painful than a sore muscle, however, compared to the searing hellfire he felt running up his right arm. The muscles and veins in his arm shifted to places they shouldn’t be; making room for an unannounced guest. The sensation subsided only after the pores in his arm split and tore themselves open as the thorns sliced their way to the surface. His arm was burning so much he almost didn’t notice the warm blood trickling down his arm. 

Taking advantage of everyone’s instinctual response to flinch at Georgie’s voice, he rushed away from the bar and toward one of the marked restrooms. 

Perhaps it was the creaking of the old floorboards when he stepped off of the brand new, squeaky clean tiled flooring that rests under the bar and onto the rest of the decrepit building, but Xerena had noticed him leaving. Her vision was more so focused on the sudden trail of blood he left behind him. 

With no words and a swift motion, she swipes four curved lines upward with the index and pinky fingers of both her hands. After connecting the tops of all four lines to a sharp corner, the trail carved by her fingers faintly glows as every drop of blood on the floor boils and evaporates. 

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The sound of the water gushing out from the faucet spout and slamming against the  cracked, chipped ceramic sink gradually gets louder as his ears stop ringing. At around the same time, his vision starts adjusting to the pitch black room he locked himself in. Slowly, and hazy, Diego begins to piece together pieces of the bar bathroom. The rickety wooden stalls with missing doors behind him. The exposed pipe of a half broken urinal next to those. His vision hasn’t adapted enough yet to see the veins of black mold traveling along the cracks in the wall tiles, but his nose was not so immune. He sees the sink in front of him, filled with liquid that seems way too dark for water, and piles of used paper towels, oozing a puddle of his blood that spills down into the basin of stained water. 

After soiling the last paper towel, he sighs as he still feels the cold warmth of his own blood cascading down his arm. He looks up, at the mirror above the sink. After taking notice of it being the only object that remains unbroken, he looks at his reflection. The haziest thing in the room; a dark silhouette that vaguely resembles a humanoid shape. It swirls and jerks in an unpredictable yet mesmerizing way. It reminds him of a flame on a windy day.

“Who’s Arthur?” He asks as he shuts off the faucet. 

Ajxthr. It’s not a person. It’s an… event.

“Scares the shit out of you.” Diego barely had time for a single blink before his face slammed itself into the mirror. It fractures, adding it to the list of ruined junk in the room. As his face pressed against the shards of glass, he thought he felt hot, heaving breaths from his shattered reflection. 

Nothing scares me. It snarls.

“Right.” Diego responds, peeling himself off the mirror. “You just ran away at the first mention of it out of… brimming confidence?” There were no stains on the mirror from what he could make out, nor did he feel anything wet from touching his skin, so he assumed he was not bleeding. “So what is it?”

Nothing that concerns you.

“Actually, in case you haven’t noticed, our lives are kinda intertwined. Whatever concerns you, concerns me.”

A short moment of silence passes. In that moment, Diego feels his heart fill and swell with a surplus of anxiety. Only for a moment, however, as Zyth eventually responds.

I suppose you could call it… a rite of passage. Or rather, a rite of ascension. Every sin must go through it. 

“And what exactly are you ascending to?”

My birthright. Superbia.

“You don’t sound so scared when you talk about it.”

It doesn’t scare me!

“Sure thing.” 

I just rather avoid it altogether. The weight of the silence that followed was light as three strands of hair compared to the one that followed its next phrase. That’s why I left. 

The silence gnaws on him like a pack of zealous fleas. Every inhale, waves of chills rush down his spine and his muscles shake and lock up. He instantly regrets having pried into the subject. Something starts brewing inside of him. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels it harden and fold into knots: one in his stomach, one in his throat. It made it hard for him to breathe, similar to when he is shackled in the dark confines of his heart. It swells up his eyes, making the pitch black room even harder to see. 

His mind is speeding away far too fast for him to catch up. All his thoughts leave the station without him, and so he waits; embedded in silence both inside and out. He opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, letting out gusts of air in place of words. As if forgetting how to speak, his tongue curls around in his mouth and, with tremendous struggle, it finally conceives words. 

“You ran away.” Diego wondered to himself if he meant it as a question or a statement. Either way didn’t matter, as through the dark blurry mirror, he sees the reflection nod in acknowledgement. “So that you —”

The train harboring his thoughts had looped around and hit him dead on at full speed. All his thoughts landed in perfect placement like a jigsaw puzzle. The reality he pieced together was too upsetting to accept. But he knew it was the reality he existed in, so to accept is his only choice. The impact loosened the knots and whatever had been concocting within him was finally let out. He laughed. 

At first it was a chuckle, if even that. A loud exhale is more like. Then came another. Then more. Each one louder than the last. As quickly as it started, the short giggling explodes into full out laughter —if it could be called that. Something more akin to a mangled hyena’s last cry comes out of his mouth. The acoustics of the dark bathroom produce echoes that stretch and distort the laughs, submerging the whole room in a cascade of horrific screeches. The sound, combined with the sick smile and the rivers of tears, make even Zyth back away from the reflection. 

Zyth’s face gets slammed into the mirror as Diego presses his own against it. The impact turns off the laughter, leaving behind an eerie calm quiet. 

“Let’s get one thing straight.” Diego speaks slow, low, and soft. As if trying to soothe a child. “Fuck. You. Fuck you and your mother and anything that has the misfortune of sharing your blood. Fuck your people and fuck your culture. I don’t give a fuck about your home issues and whatever stupid events you need to attend. You don’t pull the reins anymore. You wanted to run away, you wanted a new life. It’s not my fault you grew up fucked up, and you don’t get to take it out on me anymore. This is your new life now. Shut the fuck up and take the back seat. That’s your goddamn birthright.”

He braces himself. He knows full well the repercussions of speaking to it like that. The muscles in his body tense up until he moves as a statue, expecting to be pushed into the mirror again, or his head to be slammed into the sink. So much focus is put into preparing for physical and emotional damage that he never notices nothing happening. Through the blood pumping in his ears, and the chattering of his teeth, and the creaking of his muscles, he never notices nothing happening. Only when nothing happens does he notice nothing happening.

For a moment, only the briefest of brief moments, a crack forms through the thousands of thick and tense layers. From the crack gushes out a warm soothing sense of twisted relaxation. In this brief moment he even convinces himself that he has finally snapped back to reality. That he is his own self, at long last. Only for a moment, however.  

The air tastes fake; the air feels fake. Everything about this moment feels wrong. Not only does it perplex him, it sickens him. Diego’s stomach churns and his lungs burn. His body starts feeling light, like when he’s stuck in a dream. He stares at his reflection so long, he forgets himself. In this dark room, the fragmented silhouette is the only reference he can rely on. The arms and hands that begin to cramp intensely from gripping the edge of the sink feel more like long gloves affixed to his body, even when they morph and mold to shapes unsightly and wobble like cheap plastic under the weight of his dreadfully dreadful body. 

Then it stopped. By the time he had just gotten comfortable with the uncomfort, it all subsided. Still, Zyth remains silent. Slowly and carefully, he lets go of the sink, and straightens his posture. He tiptoes to the door, like a child sneaking out in the middle of the night, watching his reflection follow him until out of sight. Grabbing the doorknob, he takes a final moment to gather himself; ears are no longer ringing, arm is no longer bleeding, heart is beating normally, mind is emitting a constant nerve-wracking silence.

Right after he turns the doorknob, but right before he opens the door; during the silence between the click of the surprisingly still functional unlock mechanism of the old knob and the deafening creak of the rustic door, Zyth spoke. Just a simple phrase, only a few words long, but one so disgustingly baffling that his mind nearly forces itself to refuse to hear it. A phrase that shakes the very foundation of his reality, so much so that the very idea of fathoming it as real is inconceivable. So he doesn’t. He chalks it up to background noise and, without even acknowledging that there is a room behind him, he opens the door and walks out. 

The lights that dot the roof of the dining hall are bolstered by rusty and flaky chandeliers that have only not fallen due to some benign miracle. The bulbs that nestle in them emit a light so faint they barely illuminate past the confines of the light fixture. Still, compared to the void of slight that was the bathroom, it is blinding. 

Diego’s vision is immediately smeared in a dull, low, orange light. For the first second, through the painted vision, he can make out blurry figures just a few yards in front of him. He recognized the black mass covering the right side of his view as Georgie. Xerena was next to Georgie’s leg; the gold tips of her hair might be what’s blinding him most. He didn’t recognize the tall, broad person next to her until he spoke.

“Well, speak of the devil, amirite?”

Diego stifles a growl and clenches his jaw as he recognizes the decrepit, sickly voice. He should have recognized him from the rhythmic wheezing escaping through every breath and the miasmic pale green skin. His vision clears to reveal Kilquen’s wide burly figure wrapped in his gray, fur-lined, medal adorned coat. Even in his peripheral vision, Diego feels Kilquen’s gray, glossy gaze smearing all over him behind the curtain of thin oily hair. 

Kilquen extends a gloved hand. “Just who I wanted to see. Come with me. You two have visitors.”