FSE

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I woke up on a couch in Tanner's living room, seeing strange lights and shapes in the dark of night. At first I thought it was Seth, but realized his glow was there as well. It was something else. I cautiously got up and focused on one, moving around to see it was a material object, or at least three dimensional. I went up to it and tried to poke it but just reached through it. It didn't make sense to me, and I noticed a shadow flicker on the wall.

I watched it, and noticed- not only was it not in sync with anything inside the house, but it also had two, solid white eyes, that seemed to almost glow in the dark. The shadow reached a hand out across the wall, and made a gesture as if beckoning me to follow. It moved down the hall, still flat to the wall, and I followed it to the stair well. It stopped at the wall and pointed down, but all I saw were it's two eyes, white circles in the black of darkness.

They suddenly darted down the stairs and I chased after it, tripping and stumbling a couple times as I came down. After about twenty minutes I found myself in the chamber where we'd fallen off the ledge, only it was well lit. The ceiling was suspended twenty yards over my head, with long columns in the walls holding it up. The back wall was at least eighty feet away, with forty feet between the side walls. Halfway to the back wall was a massive hole, that I figured must've been where we'd fallen in. Ciph was standing at it's edge.

I walked up to him, noticing all the strange figures and lights still moving around, the shapes and strange forms that moved, changed, almost breathing and living. I inadvertently asked him, "What are they?"

"Good. I'm not alone."

"Why would you be alone?"

"Kyle and Tanner? They can't see them. No one can. It's just me and you."

"Oh... So you don't know what they are?"

"I have some pretty good guesses. When we use magic, they move. They change. When you blacked out, I saw some of them warp around you. They're not forces, like auras, but they're not quite alive, either."

"The Arcanomicon doesn't say?" [Me]

"There might be some chapter on them somewhere. The book's kinda weird. There's bindings and there's chapters. The chapters are clusters of seven pages of written code, in runes that make the first page of each chapter behave like that. But the book doesn't say everything, and it certainly doesn't need to. A master can be a master in his community, but amongst the world? That'd be impossible. So instead, there's chapters. I only have a scrap of the knowledge contained in all the chapters of the entire Arcanomicon, and I have fifty seven chapters. Three more and the book will be full."

"... Woah."

"Yeah. I'd like to think, maybe there's some way I can get more, but I'd have to talk to my brother about that, and my brother's in prison."

"You have a brother?"

"I have eight brothers and five sisters. Quite frankly, my sisters are as good as dead, two of my brothers abandoned magic, another three are in prison, and the last three are the only sane ones."

"Oh. Big family."

"Yeah. And to think, Psijius thought he could get away with the car wreck."

"Psijius? Car wreck?"

"Brother in prison, car wreck that killed Tanner's and Kyle's parents, and also killed some four hundred other people. Basically, he took a semi and sent it flying down mainstream at two hundred miles an hour with an extra eighty tons of force behind it. Some people came out of the hospital with missing limbs, some people were put in bags with missing halves of their bodies."

"Oh god..."

"That's who Greg was. He and his boyfriend were just falling in love when he was hewn in half. He never left the second half of the second-"

"Second half?"

"Uh... I'll explain later. Sorta like an afterlife. Greg's boyfriend managed to move on, but Greg possessed a friend of mine and tried to kill them. I saved the friend, but not after he pulled a gun on Tanner and himself, and... long story cut short, Greg's anchored to the Arcanomicon's cover, my friend's safe, and more importantly, so are Tanner and Kyle."

"Oh... You really love them don't you?"

"I'd die for them if I needed to. Every day I need to remind myself that it's a good thing they know about magic, that it's good that they'll be better prepared for the end than the psychopaths who'll try to destroy anything and everything."

"Oh..." There was a pause in the conversation, and a figure walked by us. When it did, it starred at us, and we starred back. It was nothing more than a dark mass, but it's eyes glowed a bright white.

"Those things are creepy." [Me]

"That's not one of the other ones, though. That's a soul, between the tick and the tock." As he spoke the figure faded into nothingness. "And there it goes, to the other half of the second."

"The tick and the tock?" [Me]

"Every second is composed of two parts, the part we live in, the tick, and the part where our soulds go when we die, the tock." [Ciph]

"So what was the soul doing here, as it went to the tock?"

"I don't know. Honestly, I don't care. Maybe it was old, and it momentarily slipped towards the tick, or maybe it was new, and it was just wandering."

"But it didn't have a tail, or a snout, or ears."

"Right... Probably from the Beneatherverse."

"Wait, what?!"

"There are strange creatures there, I haven't seen them and I don't care to, but the book describes them as fleshy and not too much unlike us."

I acted like I was shivering, "Ugh, that's super creepy."

"And to think, we just saw one's soul. Souls aren't usually that dark, let alone black."

"So it was evil."

"No, that's just man's fear of the dark taking place. There's no such thing as good or bad, the dark of a soul only states how much like you it is. If it's pitch black, it's you, it's solid white, there's nothing farther from you then it."

"Oh, that's interesting. So, what if it's red?" I gestured to a figure walking around in the corner. It had a thicker tail and snout like those of dragon's, and the horns to fit, but the whole thing was red, aside from the solid black eyes.

"I don't know, but it doesn't matter. They can't touch us, and we can't touch them."

"Oh, okay..."