Jacob and Dipak watched the commotion at the gates of Rachna. A woman was standing there, demanding to be given access to Rachna.

Dipak shook his head, wondering if this woman understood what she was seeking. She looked over her shoulder and up at Dipak, making eye contact. Dipak felt their minds connect.

"Life Spark," she whispered in his mind. Her thoughts felt like warm sunshine and soft silk, wrapping around him softly.

Dipak reached out a hand to her and let a few black motes drift from his palm. They floated down to the woman and touched her on the forehead, strengthening the connection she had established already. He could feel the strong pull that was summoning this woman to Rachna and he could feel the beeps and clicks of her Life Drive.

"Project Aeloria," Dipak thought.

She returned her gaze to the iron gates that stood before her. She stared up at them. Large, but otherwise unremarkable on their own. What made them awe striking was the two enormous trees that they were bound to. Each tree held one of the gate doors. There were no hinges or latches, just their twisting branches and leaves that held the iron rigidly in place. The woman reached out and placed her hand where the iron bit down into the bark of one of the ancient trees. They had long served this role. She could feel the fire that burned against its wood.

“Why do you hold it?” she asked.

Two large black eyes opened and looked down at her. A thin branch uncoiled from the iron and wrapped around her wrist. She did not resist it.

“Rachna,” the tree boomed in response.

“Yes, she is here,” she whispered, resting her head against the tree.

“Why do you come for Rachna?” the tree asked.

“It is calling me,” she whispered.

Lifting her by the wrist, the tree regarded her. It flung her towards the other tree and she tumbled through the air as a doll; soundless and limp. Her mind was lulled and sleeping; reaching and reaching, struggling to connect to Rachna. 

Attempting Life Drive link up: Rachna. Beep. Searching.

The other ancient caught her. Its large black eyes opened and it looked down at her, cradling her in a loop of wood.

“Why are you seeking Rachna?” it demanded.

“Mother,” she whispered.

Initiating command sequence 83645. Scanning. Seeking Rachna. Location undetermined. Beep. Scanning.

She reached out her hands, groping. Vines twisted up in her hands and small branches pierced through her palms. She cried out.

Initiating command sequence 98365. Beep.

“Mother!” she yelled.

The grain of the wood became sharp and crisp, painting out fine, detailed lines. The leaves played delicate notes that hummed quietly. The smells of the earth and the distant flowers came to her. The taste of honey. Everything around her came to life.

“Why are you seeking Rachna?” the ancient demanded again.

She didn’t have an answer. Something inside her told her that she needed to go, that she had to be there, that mother was waiting.

“It’s mother,” she whispered and then added, “mother is waiting.”

“Mother?” one of the ancients asked.

The giant trees shuddered and they shrugged themselves. Slowly, some of the smaller branches unwound themselves from the iron and from each other. Leaves shuddered and fell, raining down on the damp earth. Wood moaned. The trees hunched themselves down over the creature that was captured in the loops of wood. Heaving their roots up from the ground, they moved closer together, bringing their great bulks in front of the gate.

She wept. There was no answer.

Then the attack began. The branches came down, striking through her. Each biting into her, taking away chunks of flesh. A large, pointed branch came down at her chest.

“No!” she screamed.

She tore her arms free, breaking the binding wood into splinters and caught the branch. Holding it a few inches from her, she looked up at the ancient. The attack continued while they looked at each other. With each strike, she cried out. But she offered no other resistance.

“Why?” she asked them weakly.

“Why are you seeking Rachna?” they boomed at her.

She flung the branch away and laid herself back against the loops of wood. It didn’t matter any more. She saw the final strike coming, but made no attempt to block it. Letting the wood bite through her chest, she closed her eyes. Making a quiet grunting noise, she thought to herself “There, it’s done.”

Life Drive engaged. Beep. Renewal initiated. Beep. Initiating command sequence 98365 override. Beep.

Her eyes snapped open. They glowed green. Now she fought. Breaking the wood and tossing it aside. Running up the length of a larger branch she dove down, severing it. Striking the ground, she staggered and fell to her side.

Renewal priority. Beep.

Green light flared, washing over her body. Slowly, she floated from the ground, turning so that it looked as though she was laying on the air; peacefully asleep. The torn and bloody flesh boiled up in snapping little bubbles. It ran off in hot rivers and dripped onto the ground, burning holes where it fell, tunneling down into the dirt. Broken bones cracked and realigned themselves, stretching and growing to fill gaps where needed. Muscle and skin spun themselves out and smoothed out over the once damaged body.

Renewal complete. Beep. Preservation given priority. Beep. Scanning. No threat detected. Beep.

She settled back onto the ground, laying in a pool of brilliant green light.

Command sequence 98365 stand by. Beep.

One of the ancients reached out a leaf to her.

Scanning. Beep. No threat detected. Beep.

“Child,” it said.

“I must see Mother,” she stated.

“Aelorian,” the other ancient said.

She made no effort to rise from the ground. The two trees shuddered and pulled away, drawing the gates open as they retreated. She sat up and looked up at them. Mother was waiting. She stiffly rose to her feet, being careful until she realized that everything felt as it always did.

A path of white stone cut sharply through the underbrush. She stared at it a long time before deciding to travel its course. The path seemed to wind and twist endlessly through the forest. She leaned heavily against a tree and looked ahead of her.

Dipak turned away and walked into the shadows of Enaid, severing the connection between them with a sharp gesture of her hand. This woman would drink the waters of Rachna and if she lived, she would become the next Queen of the fey. There was nothing that Dipak could do for her now. Rachna would decide her fate.

"Who is she?" Jacob asked, turning to follow.

Dipak could feel Gaia’s magic working to change his flesh and he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to be around anyone right now. Jacob had such blind faith that he wouldn’t hurt him, but he was naïve and foolish the way children always are. If he lost control of the darkness growing inside him, no one would be safe, not even Jacob.

Erebos consumes everything, even the things that were loved.

He pressed his hands between the folds of shadow and opened a door to a place few could follow him. He stepped into the Wastelands of Erebos, the places on the edges of Aer where Erebos still clung. This place felt more like home than Aer did right now. He did not belong in the realm of the mortals. He had never been one of them. Yes, he died like them, but he never returned to the Life Stream. Only back to the dark waters of Rachna before being reborn.

He ignored Jacob's protests and let the fold close behind him. Stripping away his clothing, he shoved it into the Aether. He had always stored his things in the Aether. There was a time that had made sense to him. Now nothing did. There was only this fragmenting despair. He ran his fingers over the cracking flesh on his chest. Black oozed from these wounds. How much longer could his flesh contain the darkness? If he broke before the next Life Tree was planted then Erebos would come.

Roaming the darkness, he let his memories unfold, thinking back to the time of the Narrator. This place was her selfish sin, her refusal to tell the stories and name the souls had condemned them to this darkness. Shades whispered past him and he wondered if they could be called back by the next Narrator. He let them bling to him, the way that they had once clung to the Narrator, but he could offer them nothing. Their stories and names were silent. He could only hear the forlorn moaning of the lost.

Touching his fingertips to the bark of a twisted tree, he looked up at the swirling sky. Should they allow Erebos to come? He felt the press of their hands against his back and understood why the Narrator and not called their names. Tears fell from his eyes as he dropped to his knees.

Most of the skin had sloughed off his back, leaving blackness coiling out in fine tendrils. The underlying tissue was black with an oily film. Everything felt disjointed and unreal. Nothing made sense any more. He imaged that he could hear their voices, a low thrum at the back of his skull begging him for the darkness so that another time of rebirth could call them forth.

Raking his long claws against the bark of the tree, he howled out his pain. Spasms racked his body and he could not hold himself still. Things crawled beneath the surface, digging their way out. He could feel their tiny legs at work against his flesh, undoing him. A chunk of skin peeled back from his shoulder, revealing the writhing mass beneath. Black muscle with black busy worms; crawling, digging and chewing. Slime oozed out of the fresh wound. He pulled the lump of skin off and tossed it away.

“There you are,” Jacob said as he knelt down next to him.

All his eyes rolled so they could stare at him.

“Leave me alone,” Dipak said.

Jacob picked up a small piece of flesh from the ground and looked at it a moment before saying “You’re falling apart.”

“I am the physical manifestation of decay and destruction,” Dipak said. “Did you expect that to be pretty?”

Jacob cocked his head to one side.

“Is this what you are going to bring to the world?” Jacob asked.

“If the Life Seed cannot be planted, the world will be consumed by darkness,” Dipak said.

"Are you the darkness then?" Jacob asked.

"No," Dipak closed his main eyes, leaving the rows of lesser eyes focused on Jacob's face. "I am the door that will open the way."

"You are not evil," Jacob whispered.

Dipak grunted.

"The time of darkness is as much a part of the cycle as the time of light. Neither is good or right, but a part of the greater whole," Jacob said.

Dipak moaned as another piece of himself slide off onto the ground.

"Every aspect of the Life Spark is about ensuring the continued cycle of the Life Tree. Maybe it is time for the darkness again."

"It's too soon," Dipak whispered.

Jacob raised an eyebrow.

"It has never been so soon," Dipak explained, then looked past Jacob to the restless shades that stirred in the dark.

Jacob shrugged.

“Come back to Enaid,” Jacob said.

“I cannot be trusted,” Dipak said.

“We need you,” Jacob said.

“You cannot count on me,” Dipak whispered, closing his eyes.

“Horse, what is happening to you?” Jacob asked.

Dipak sighed.

He gently ran his claws along Jacob's face, leaving a trail of black ichor behind.

“I am losing myself in the Weave,” Dipak said.

Jacob laid down next to Dipak and wrapped himself around him. It was like holding onto a bag of miscellaneous maggot infested meat bits wrapped loosely into a leather pouch. Everywhere he touched either slimed him with black goo or shed off onto him. There was nothing solid. 

“Is that why you are changing?” Jacob asked.

“I don’t know,” Dipak confessed.

Jacob watched the worms working within the muscle of Dipak’s shoulder and felt his stomach churn.

“I have never changed forms while alive before. I have always come into being as Gaia needs me to be,” Dipak said.

“Do you recall your other lives then?” Jacob asked.

“Not completely,” Dipak said. “There are just things that I know about myself. Rules that I wake knowing.”

He shrugged weakly. There was no good way to explain the way that he knew things about himself without fully remembering his previous lives. That was just the way that it worked. It was some part of the magic. Perhaps it was Rachna that told him these things while he was being reborn.

“So you’re sure this has never happened to you before?” Jacob asked.

Dipak nodded and opened his mouth to answer, but then paused. Was he sure? How could he be? There was no doubt that his knowledge of himself and his past lives was incomplete. It was like he held fragments of every life he'd every lived, of every person he had been. But there was more there then he could hold in his hands so things always fell out. No matter how many times he scooped up the past, there was always things missing.

“It is against my understanding of the rules,” Dipak said. 

Jacob nodded.

“What are you thinking?” Dipak asked.

“I was just wondering if Gaia might have protected you from this,” Jacob said.

“What do you mean?” Dipak asked.

“If this was something you had to go through every time you were the Aspect of Wrath, it would be kind for Gaia to not give you all the details of it,” Jacob said.

Dipak considered. The idea that Gaia had not told him everything about himself within the rule set was unsettling. Dipak looked over his shoulder at Raven when he thought this.

“Do you remember becoming the Life Spark?” Jacob asked.

“Yes,” Dipak said. 

Jacob silently watched Dipak who was now gazing off into the distance as if seeing another place.

“It was in a time before time, the Soul Tree was first bound and Gaia was born into Aer,” Dipak stated.

He laid his hand over Jacob’s. He could not keep himself from trembling. 

"The Immortal Life Tree was dying and we had to do something to save our people, to save the magic," he whispered.

The shadow forest around Dipak swayed with the soft lullaby of distant whispers, their voices unsteady like autumn leaves dancing in the wind. He was slipping again, his memories unraveling, pulling him backward through lives he’d already lived. Every breath he took seemed to dissolve his present self, blurring the boundaries between who he had been and who he was meant to be.

He felt the sickness creeping into his mind, a slow, dark tide threatening to drown him in himself. For a moment, he could still grasp onto his present, to the fragmented but solid sense of who he was now, but then it slipped through his fingers like ash. His vision blurred as another memory overtook him, dragging him unwillingly back.

Falling through the life times, striking the walls of each death he tumbled into himself. Loosing all tense of the Weave, he grasped at any piece that his mind could hold. A woman in a long blue dress. Children in a field. Raven looming over him while he ran in the hot sun. All the pieces fell down around him. 

He had stood beneath the canopy of towering trees, their trunks twisted and immense, with branches that seemed to reach out as if inviting him forward. The air had been thick with the scent of earth and moss, mingling with the faint sweetness of life itself. Fey gathered around him, their faces solemn, some nodding to him with reverence. He was young then—so much younger, filled with certainty and the fierce devotion to protect all that was good and green in Aer. He remembered Gaia standing before him, her presence towering and vast, yet she radiated a warmth he had always found comforting. She had seen his soul, stripped bare, with all his flaws, his weaknesses, his fears.

“Do you understand what you’re choosing, Dipak?” Gaia’s voice echoed in his mind, soft yet resonant, as if it had spoken directly to his bones. “This is not a path to walk lightly.”

He remembered the feeling of his heart pounding, a steady, eager rhythm.

“Yes,” he had said, without hesitation. “I am ready to serve, to protect.”

In that moment, he had truly believed it, his devotion unbreakable, the honor blindingly clear. But there had been no way to understand then, no way to know the weight of countless lives or the solitude of endless rebirth.

Gaia had then led him to Rachna, the Well of Creation. He’d stared into the deep, dark water, catching glimpses of swirling lights—souls, that had whispered to him. His reflection had trembled on the surface, and in it, he’d seen not himself, but a reflection of the duty he was about to take on, the eternity he was binding himself to.

The waters of Rachna had been hot when he drank, their taste rich, almost metallic, like the essence of life itself condensed into a single drop. And with that first swallow, he felt his soul tugged, as though invisible threads bound him to the Well, to the Soul Tree, to Gaia, to Aer itself. He had fallen forward, his vision blurred by streaks of light and darkness, until he felt himself dissolve, reformed by the depths of Rachna. He plunged into the dark waters and felt himself catch on fire. Within those waters, he had been bound to both life and death.

He’d emerged as the Life Spark, transformed, with a new certainty in his purpose and his place in Aer.

But that purpose was buried now, lost beneath the surge of memories that flooded over him, drowning out his once-clear sense of self. Now he felt only shadows creeping in, dark, consuming—a rot twisting its way into his soul, disfiguring him from the inside. His hands, trembling and veined with streaks of dark mana, were unfamiliar, alien.

He clutched his head, his thoughts tearing in two directions, one part clinging to the light and purpose of the Life Spark, the other succumbing to the weight of all the times that he had failed. Faces flickered before him—those he had loved, protected, lives he’d saved, and ones he’d lost. They cried out to him, accusing, demanding, pulling him deeper into the darkness. His body began to contort, muscles and bones shifting painfully, as if they were remaking themselves into something darker, something terrible.

“No,” he whispered, his voice harsh and strained. “I am the Life Spark. I am bound to protect…” But the words felt hollow, slipping into the air with a lifelessness that terrified him.

His reflection appeared again, this time in a puddle at his feet—a twisted, malformed creature staring back. Dark eyes, glowing faintly with an eerie rust, and skin streaked with cracks of shadow and decay. This was not him, but he could feel it rising from deep within, a creature born of his memories, his failures, his pain.

He stumbled forward, clawing at his own chest as if he could tear the darkness away.

“Gaia, please…” he choked, desperate. “I need… I need to remember who I am.”

But his plea was met with silence, and as he fell to his knees, he felt the last remnants of his present self slipping away, overtaken by the weight of countless lives. The memories, once his pride, now became chains, dragging him further into the shadows of his own mind, leaving him alone—an echo, a fragment of the Life Spark he had once been.

Then a feather light touch caressed his cheek and a soft voice called his name.

"Horse," Raven whispered.

Dipak clung to Jacob, desperate to hold onto this outline of what he was supposed to be.

He closed his primary eyes slowly, their eerie glow dimming as the rot and decay under his skin seemed to pulse with a rhythm of its own. He looked at Jacob with his row of lesser eyes, his expression a mixture of confusion and sorrow.

“No,” Dipak murmured. “I’ve never experienced this. I’ve always known my place—what I was meant to be—until now. Something’s... changing.”

Jacob stayed still, his hands resting against Dipak’s shaking form. The weight of the situation hung heavily between them, like a suffocating cloud. He wanted to offer comfort, to reassure Dipak, but the words stuck in his throat. He had no idea how to help someone so broken by their own existence.

“You’re not alone,” Jacob finally said, his voice soft but firm. "I'm here. And I don't care what happens, Dipak. We’ll find a way through this."

Dipak’s eyes flickered toward Jacob’s face, the black ichor still dripping from his skin. The words were almost too much for him to bear. His body ached, not just from the physical decay but from the weight of everything he had been—his past, his purpose, the burden of the Life Spark that he had never understood until it was too late.

“I can’t control it, Jacob,” Dipak whispered, voice cracked and raw. “The darkness inside me... it consumes everything. I can feel it. I’ve always felt it.”

Jacob reached out and placed a hand on Dipak’s chest, feeling the unnatural warmth of his body, the crackling energy that surged within him, raw and chaotic.

“It’s not your fault,” Jacob said. “And it's not the darkness that's defining you. It's the choices you make.”

Dipak closed his eyes, a faint shudder passing through him as another sliver of his flesh peeled away, falling to the ground in a sickening mass of blackened ichor. The sight made Jacob’s stomach turn, but he fought to keep his focus, to keep his hand on Dipak’s chest as a small anchor in the chaos.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Jacob,” Dipak murmured, his voice shaking. “I don’t want to bring the darkness to you. It will devour everything.”

Jacob’s grip tightened, as if he could hold the pieces of Dipak together with his touch. “But I’m here, Dipak. I’m not afraid of you. I’ll help you fight this. Whatever it takes.”

Dipak’s breathing was uneven, and for a moment, his eyes flickered back to their normal color, a faint glimmer of hope buried beneath the raw fear.

"Jacob, you don't know what you're promising," Dipak said, his voice trembling.

“I don’t care," Jacob responded, his words steady. "I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you.”

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Dipak’s body was a canvas of decay and rebirth, and Jacob was the tether, the one thing keeping him grounded. Slowly, Dipak’s breathing steadied, though his body continued to tremble as the darkness fought to consume him.

“I can’t promise it will be easy," Jacob whispered, "but I can promise you won’t face it alone."

Dipak looked down at the mess of his body and the small piece of himself still clinging to his skin. The black ichor had begun to pool on the ground, and the smell of rot filled the air. Yet, in Jacob’s presence, something flickered.