March from Darkness | ✓ (to be edited)

NINETEEN

PHRER

Demitri slept for a week after the incident.

In that time, the bitch had taken to attempting to attack his dreams on several occasions. The only thing that had stopped her from breaking him completely was the ever-diligent Oneiroi that Odin had managed to convince to help us. With their help, Koralai had not even been able to project to him, allowing Demitri to rest; granted, that did not mean that he was free from nightmares. Aldebran, the leader of the Oneiroi team, said that Demitri's brain was simply too unwilling to accept a comfort and that he had actually almost killed one of the more persistent creatures. What they did tell me about the nightmare-scape made me wonder how he managed to rest at all.

They had described his nightmares as an empty blackness so absolute that not even they could see through it. It was just a void filled with screams and cries of the tortured, albeit deserving, souls that Demitri had killed. The only difference in the darkness that could be seen was the faintest dot of golden light that could never be approached, no matter how hard the Oneiroi had tried, and the faintest pleas of mercy, for forgiveness, for a release from the never-ending pain that emanated from the light. Demitri did not pray to a God, he did not know how, but Aldebran said that the pleas had made even him want to weep at the sheer helplessness of them.

Demitri was killing himself with his guilt, but I could not bring myself to wake him. If he truly wanted to be awake, he would be, whether it be peacefully or kicking and screaming. His eyes had opened several times over the course of his slumber, but much like they had been before his self-induced coma, they were a glassy, unseeing myriad of swirling colours, although, thankfully, the most prominent was green. He, or rather the creature inside of him, whispered words nearly too faint to hear, and the words It muttered were simply incomprehensible. They were uttered in the language that I did not know, but this time, they made no sense to me. After It was through with Its quiet ramblings, Demitri's colour-filled eyes would roll back in his head, his eyelids would flutter, and he would fall back into a certain slumber.

I stayed with him the entire time, neglecting food and sleep, not that I needed much anyways, but Soria had forced me to rest my overactive brain by occasionally giving me a dose of wolf's bane in a glass of water. Soria had taken to staying with him when I could not, and I had found her once reading passages of the Daode Jing to him; her hope, her thoughts told me, was that maybe it would reach his soul and would grant some peace and allow him to let go of his guilt.

It was at moments like these that I still wondered how he could not see the good that he had done.

Yes, he had killed people, and yes, a few were not deserving of the manner of death he had dealt them, but no matter his mannerisms, they were going to be tortured in their Afterlives, anyways. The people he had taken from the mortal plane were more than deserving of an end, and in that regard, Demitri was not seen as a killer to the Universe; according to the prophecy proposed, Demitri was a bringer of peace and justice, despite his violence.

Death was not a malevolent being. In fact, Uro was a rather passive entity most of the time, but that did not make her impartial all the time when she had to take the souls of the evil. She had been more than happy to see that Demitri had taken it upon himself to fulfil those ends when she had learned of his role in the Universe, and she had expressed her gratitude to the Universe many times over the years for bringing a person who understood that Death was not always a cruel mistress. She had even been hesitant to bring Demitri's soul to Glitnir and had almost reinstated his soul to his body, but she knew what the prophecy entailed, so she had brought him to us.

The only good thing that really came out of the illusion that led min vackra to this state was we now knew what Chaos looked like. The terrible thing that came out of that, however, was the fact that the last vision had been a couple months ago now, and that we knew his name. We had to now avoid saying, even thinking, that name in case it drew him out of whatever place he had holed himself up in. It was clear that he could travel to the mortal world, or at the very least he could create illusions himself; those were the only ways that would have allowed him to not only capture Demitri's mortal vessel, but kill it, as well. I was unable to tell whether the place we had been transported to was lightless because of the illusion or if it was due to something much more sinister, and that was more than concerning.