"Welcome back, Prism."

  Prism woke up nude on a soft black bed that was shaped like an obsidian clamshell. There were ebony, velveteen sheets beneath his dark skin that made him feel like he was in the lap of luxury. He pushed an equally dark duvet off of his muscular body, yawned loudly and stretched out like a cat waking up from a nap.

  He lazily looked around for the source of the warm, familiar voice that didn't sound quite human. The starry-skied landscape stretched out all around him was too mesmerizing to be real, he thought. When he saw that the ground that his bed sat on was also an infinite sea of stars, he surmised that he was in a carefully constructed dreamscape.

  He had a vague sense that he'd been brought here before, perhaps numerous times. His dreaming mind ached when he tried to recall any actual memories he might have had about the past experiences. The feeling of familiarity began to fade just as quickly as it had come to him. He was left in a state of confusion and disorientation that made him sit up in the bed and furrow his brow.

  "Why do you fight?"

  Prism grabbed his forehead and shook his head slightly. He thought about the question, then thought about whether or not he should respond. He was in a dream that he didn't control and his mind was vulnerable, something that shouldn't be the case given his race's natural psychic defenses. He instinctively clenched his jaw and leaned forward, placing his elbows atop his knees.

  "You're powerful, whatever you are. You're in my head and you're trapping my mind in a dream of your own design. If I had to guess...you're some sort of psychic being." Prism said loudly with a sternness that made it clear that he was not happy with the situation.

  "Why do you fight?" the voice warbled again.

  Prism rose to his feet and groaned. His feet felt nothing as they walked over the transparent ground. "You're taking advantage of my exhaustion. I passed out after beating that plasma beast...and you saw an opportunity to worm your way into my head," he spoke out into the ether.

  "Why do you stay here? Why do you stay here and fight?"

  "Because I don't have anywhere else to go!" Prism screamed and swung his fist up through the air. He had tears in his eyes.

  There were several seconds of silence, followed by Prism's choked sobs. He held himself for a moment in the brightness of the phantom starlight, soothing the torturous loneliness that began to rise to the surface of his heart.

  "You are welcome here. You can stay here for as long as you'd like."

  A warm wind blew past Prism as though it were the breath of the disembodied voice. Prism rubbed his face and wiped his eyes. It was silly of him to cry in a dream, he told himself.

  "What are you?" Prism asked without hope, certain that he'd get no meaningful answer.

  "I am the unifier of minds. I am the shelter of the departed. I am many things."

  "Who are you?"

  "Humanity knows me as Eizavoba. You may call me the same."

  Prism, who'd been addressing the sky when he spoke, took a step back. He narrowed his eyes and tilted his head as he tried to make sense of the voice's admission. "Could it be true?" he asked himself.

  He'd been to worlds where gods were not only real, but tangible beings of flesh and blood. It wasn't completely absurd that he could be speaking with ?ba's ancient god, the one that he'd been mistaken for. However, Prism reminded himself that the voice had exerted its power over him to suppress his thoughts. He couldn't even remember what he'd been thinking about earlier, and that scared him.

  "I can't trust you. You've been messing with my head, making me forget things..." Prism said through clenched teeth and with an even more clenched fist. If he'd been awake, his fingernails would have surely caused his palms to bleed. For all he knew, he was bleeding in the waking world.

  "I am not the person who is altering your mind. I am merely trying to communicate with you, to understand you." The voice chimed. It gained an ominous quality that made Prism feel nauseous.

  "I..." Prism started speaking, but the urge to vomit came over him. He fought back the strange, sudden sickness. "I don't believe you," he said meekly.

  "This meddlesome being within you is poisonous to your very being. I have tried to extract it, but it is adept at hiding from me and from you. You worsen the situation by intentionally adding more beings to your own. You are not suited to such things as I am."

  "Adding more beings? What do you mean?" Prism asked.

  "Hetal Swedi Omdado Zazi Urman," the voice jingled with a clearness that reverberated through Prism's very soul.

  "The...young...officer..."

  Prism fell to his knees and grabbed his head as a flood of recollection nearly swallowed him whole. The Royalist whose mind he'd siphoned seemed to claw to the surface of Prism's consciousness like a wrathful spirit. Prism screamed from the pain that the psychic vengeance inflicted upon him, long overdue from a moment of cold cruelty that he knew could threaten to unmake him.

  "You resisted the ill effects of incorporating this man's mind into your own thanks to the adrenaline that pumped through your flesh, but that chemical aid has been exhausted. You thought that you could uncouple the memories from the man, but that was folly. His memories, his knowledge, have coalesced into the tortured, disembodied being that now fights against you in recesses far deeper than this dreamscape can reach."

  Prism could barely make out the dream entity's words as he tried to wrestle Hetal back to a state of unconsciousness. Prism was shocked how the young officer had pieced together some sort of rabid existence from errant memories that the elementeitan had stored in his mind. Prism knew that it was possible for a being with psychic abilities to do such a thing, but there was no indication that Hetal had such powers. Prism was more inclined to believe that the dream entity calling itself Eizavoba was responsible for this sudden attack.

  "Make it stop!" Prism screamed at the dream entity for relief. Hetal pushed against Prism's already-weakened psychic defenses until the pain became too much for the alien.

  "The Meddler wore itself out waking you up. It wishes to help you, I can sense that, but it must simply watch this wild being of your own making destroy you. This was your doing, Prism. You did something you knew was morally and mentally injurious simply to aid in the slaughtering that you have made a habit of since reawakening on this world."

  Prism heard the disembodied voice of the dream entity change its tone to one of pure castigation. The alien looked up weakly at the sky of stars as he managed to get a hold on Hetal's raging essence. Prism felt warm tears begin to stream down his cheeks. It all felt so real; the grief and the agony of being confronted with the abandonment of the peaceful person he'd once strived to be.

  He'd come to accept the violence he used on a daily basis. It was not only a tool that he'd become accustomed to employing, but one that he oftentimes enjoyed using. That realization and the acceptance of it that came shortly afterwards seemed to dull the pain of all that was still happening to him.

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  "I'm not the person that I wanted to be before I came to ?ba. I'm a wolf now; I'm part of a pack that kills its enemies. Those morals that I had...I've laid them down," Prism said as he started to stand up. His body quaked and wobbled as he rose to his feet. "I've digested minds before, minds that have changed me for better and for worse." Prism relaxed his body and slowly began to raise his arms above his sides. "If this broken mind wants to fight its way to the surface, then so be it."

  Prism relinquished his hold on the rabid mind within his own. It shot through his layers of consciousness like a rocket to the stars until it appeared before Prism within the dreamscape as a red humanoid force of wildly flickering energy. The form looked like pure malevolent rage as it lunged at Prism with the ferocity of a wildfire. Prism still stood with his arms jutted out above his sides, defenseless and seemingly welcoming of the attacker. Just as it was about to strike Prism, the distorted image of Hetal's broken mind erupted in a flash of embers that flew past Prism. Prism looked around him as the embers faded away into nothingness.

  "I won't let you risk the stability of your mind in some display of reckless acquiescence. You are too important for such foolishness," said the dream entity with a sonorous sound that soothed Prism whether he wanted to or not. "There is still much I need to understand about you."

  "No, this is...too strange...I'm...too tired for all of this...psychology..."

  Prism walked back over to the bed and sat down on the black edge of its solid frame, which was as smooth and as hard as polished marble. He slipped onto the mattress and its soft fuzzy black sheets, grabbing the thick warm covers that lay at the foot of the bed. He pulled it up over him, tuning out the astral dreamscape and the curiosity it piqued within him.

  "Now the Meddler, free from Hetal's disturbance, puts you to sleep while you dream? It will do anything to stop our conversations. What does it have to fear, I wonder?"

  The distorted rambling of the being claiming to be Eizavoba trailed off as Prism went from a state of lucid dreaming to an even deeper level of unconsciousness. For a brief moment, he felt as if he was being cradled within strong, warm arms. Prism no longer dreamed in this state, instead getting the rest his mind and body so desperately needed after days of psychic intrusions.

  ****

  "That isn't exactly right, Ursun. The True Twins Gospel may have started off as a fundamentalist group of zealots, but they're now more of a manifestation of the resentment that the everyday people have against Gusa's environmentally destructive policies. The man masquerades as a religious leader while trampling on the very traditions that he is supposed to embody." Prism could hear Wadaw saying with conviction as the elementeitan started to wake up.

  "You act as if your group of guerillas isn't still highly religious. You might be a rational actor, but surely you see the danger of letting a bunch of traditionalist take over a highly-militarized country?" Ursun spoke loudly from the driver's seat. He looked in the rearview mirror in an attempt to maintain eye contact with his interlocuter.

  "Not to mention the fact that there are still elements within the True Twins that would love nothing more than to launch a holy war against the rest of ?ba in the name of their "true" god." Leanna added to Ursun's argument.

  "Listen, I may have lived my young adult life over in your Conjunction, but I never abandoned my Sguvan identity. I resent all of these generalizations you're making about my people." Wadaw raised his chin and crossed his arms.

  Prism opened his eyes to see that he was laying beside Wadaw in the backseat. Leanna was sitting in the passenger seat beside Ursun, glancing back at Wadaw every so often to see how he was responding to the conversation. Prism could see that the sun was setting to his left as the sky darkened. He could also make out the trees of the jungle moving past them.

  The mana was denser than it had been on the other side of the Adagadis; dense enough to indicate the presence of a great confluence of mana. He tried to track down where the mana flowed from, or what it flowed around, but he only got a vague sense of its motive dynamics. What he could tell was that it was emanating from the east, where they were all headed.

  Prism felt a pool of drool beneath his cheek and he sometimes felt the top of his head bounce against Wadaw's thigh. The hard cushions of the military vehicle provided little comfort to his still-aching body. He decided to keep lying against it so that he could hear more of what the others were talking about.

  "You're obfuscating the issue," Ursun groaned as he took his right hand off the steering wheel to point it at something that Prism couldn't see. "Are you really saying that most True Twins, and most Sguvans for that matter, aren't ardent believers of Eizavobism, even if they don't believe in the Queen's divinity?"

  Wadaw raised his arms and shrugged his shoulders. "There is a saying that my people have; to be Sguvan is to believe in what you cannot see. I won't deny what you're saying. What I will deny is that the people of this nation are locked into a certain type of belief."

  "And what, you'll lead them to an age of reason?" Ursun scoffed.

  "I'm certain that I and those like myself can grab the reins from the less sensible of our ranks, when the time comes." Wadaw said without hesitation.

  A wry smile inched across Ursun's face. "You always did have some sort of contingency in place. That's why Finisome liked you so much."

  "Yes, and you just thought it was annoying." Wadaw chuckled.

  "It never feels good thinking you're about to win only for your opponents to turn everything around out of nowhere." Ursun shook his head with the tight-lipped smile still on his face.

  "Roughball, right? You seem like you’d be an absolute juggernaut at it, sir.” Leanna grinned over at him.

  “An apt observation, Leanna. His fans used to call him “Ursun the Unstoppable”.” Wadaw said with a nod and a point at Ursun.

  “I had a good run in the Conjunction Roughball League before giving my all to the RED ten years ago. I still get calls from the CRL every so often, asking me to make a comeback.” Ursun bragged as modestly as one could. “Enough about that,” he made his voice sound younger and more playful. “You still haven’t explained this elaborate new identity you’ve cooked up, Jiwa.”

  “Well would you look at that; your Magical Man has finally woken up.”

  Prism looked up at Wadaw, who was looking down at him. The two smiled at each other before Prism sat up straight in his seat. “It’s Magical boy,” he said to Wadaw with a raised finger.

  “It may have been, but seeing as how you’re all grown up now…” Leanna turned in her seat and batted her green eyelashes at him. Her helmet and smart-visor sat in her lap while she held lightly onto her PAW.

  "How are you so effortlessly beautiful, even with all the day's grime on you?" Prism leaned forward and said to her in a soft way.

  "Oh stop it, you!" She grinned and pushed him back into his seat. The two shared a much needed laugh that didn't last anywhere near as long as they'd hoped.

  "You were murmuring in your sleep again. You had some of us real worried." Ursun nudged his head beside him and behind him.

  "I couldn't be that worried. I've only seen him sleep one other time. He was a wreck then, too." Wadaw flipped his curly white hair just as Lorias would do in that situation. "I just thought it was how his kind rests."

  "It's becoming more and more normal for him. He barely tells us anything about his mental health, so we're left to wonder." Leanna sighed.

  "How many times do I have to tell you guys? By elementeitan standards, I'm a teenager. Teenaged brain development in most species is hectic and unpredictable. I'm just going through "growing pains." I'm changing into something that even I don't understand." Prism waved off their concern while only making them worry in more ways than they already were.

  "How fun, another one of your alien idioms. "Growing pains"...yes, we call them "wising wildings"." Wadaw explained.

  Leanna rubbed her chin on hearing that one. "I'm not sure those two things mean the same thing..." she looked back and said to Wadaw, who merely smiled and nodded dismissively at her. "Anyway, we've been driving for about six hours. We're headed to a patch of jungle that's known for its powerful EM interference, according to him," she pointed at Wadaw and continued, "so yeah, that's where we're staying the night."

  "Maybe that's a manifestation of the area's increased mana density." Prism mumbled to himself.

  "You sensing another confluence?" Ursun turned his head slightly to look at Prism via his peripheral vision.

  "I think so. It's weird, actually. I haven't sensed such complex mana flows since arriving here. On ?ba, I mean." Prism gestured towards the east with hands that made undulating and spinning motions.

  "We are drawing closer to the Divine Valley. Maybe that is what you're sensing." Wadaw said softly.

  "You mean the site where your "god" was tortured and slain?" Leanna spoke with such insensitivity that Prism furrowed his brow at her.

  "Eizavoba amassed a great number of his believers there and taught them the Precepts of Peace. The suffering that followed simply magnified his message." Wadaw, unperturbed, explained. "It's not far from Zazi."

  "It's too dangerous," said Ursun with a finality that bugged Prism. "It'll already be hard enough to pull off this coup without having to worry about you becoming the world's biggest target."

  "That might be for the best. If this Eizavoba really is your world's god, then the site of their death might also be the heart of your world's mana. My body would be destroyed if I tried to absorb a world's heart. Heck, your world would probably be destroyed." Prism said. The others picked up on the sound of regret in his voice.

  "You're still craving it, aren't you? To devour the "heart" of ?ba?" Leanna asked.

  The vehicle became silent as everyone waited for Prism to respond. He simply turned his body toward the window and watched the phosphorescent foliage begin to glow as the sky became dark.