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"You're scared."

Edwin looked up, eyes fixed to a point on the wall behind Ambient. He tightened his grip on the hilt of his blade, lips drawn in a taut line as the giant continued speaking in his rock salt rasp.

"Eddy, you're scared that people are going to think differently of you."

The giant's words echoed and bounced off the walls of the dimly lit passageway like stray bullets, and Edwin imagined each one embedded in his skin like icy hot shrapnel. At this rate, Ambient's words were going to tear him to shreds, piece by agonizing piece, until there was nothing left to salvage. Until he was nothing.

It scared him, that Ambient knew him so well. That the giant could read his thoughts just by looking at the expression drawn across his dirt-smeared face.

Edwin had never even seen Ambient's face. His eyes flicked up for a moment to the horned black mask covering most of the giant's long features. It left only his eyes and a sliver of his forehead exposed. His skin was beaded with sweat.

"Eddy, when I told you that you were never going to escape this, that wasn't me being cruel toward you." Ambient pressed his splayed fingertips together, eyes flashing something cold and fierce as he peered down at the human boy who was beginning to tremble.

"Eddy, it's true. You are never going to be free from this. This war—it's yours to finish."

Edwin shut his eyes for a moment, trying to block out the things around him. He needed silence. He needed to clear his head of his own twisted, swirling thoughts, even if just for a brief moment. He needed some clarity.

He erased the flickering torch lights mounted on the wall in front of him first. Then he erased Ambient, and then the passageway all together. And Edwin imagined.

Red. Red where red shouldn't be. Edwin could see it now, bodies strewn across the rolling hills. Staining the earth the color of rust. Screams, agonizing screams choked with fear that would continue to bounce around in his empty skull for as long as he was alive to hear them.

The night smelled of violence, reeked of it, and they swarmed to it like flies on a decaying grey body slumped over in the grass. And Edwin couldn't help but mull over the fact that the decaying lump had once been a living, breathing person, and somehow the slash of a bloodthirsty sword had put an end to that.

And high above those rolling red hills, that was where Edwin stood. The moonlight danced across the cool blue steel of his blade, and winked at the center of the fat round sapphire embedded in its leather hilt. Edwin could still remember the metallic taste of blood on his tongue, and how, after a while, it was like the sword was doing all of the work for him. The night air was split by his sharpened steel and the harrowing screams of the people around him. And, for a moment, Edwin had to wonder if they were distant memories at all.

Or if they were something else. Something darker, like an omen. Foreshadowing of what was to come. Something that was entirely worse than old demons coming back to haunt him.

Edwin could deal with the old demons.

It was the prospect of news ones that scared him the most.

Suddenly Edwin was aware that Ambient was kneeling down in front of him. Now that they were mere inches apart from each other, he was reminded with a jolt that Ambient was, well, a great deal bigger than him. Edwin got a crick in his neck from looking all the way up to meet the giant's bitter black coffee gaze, and he instinctively took a step back. He felt his back press up against the wall behind him. Ambient either didn't notice his increasing discomfort at their sudden closeness, or he didn't care and simply chose to ignore it.

"Did it happen again?" Ambient said, a glint of curiosity flashing behind his dark eyes. He looked eager now, furling and unfurling his hands in his lap. "Did you have another vision?"

"No?" Edwin started, looking tentative. He paused and dropped his gaze to the ground, digging the toe of his boot into a clump of dirt. "Well, maybe. I don't know." He ran his hands through his disheveled hair, closing his fingers around dark brown curls and tugging at the roots. "Ambient, I think they're getting worse. And, and I don't know how to stop them. I don't know what any of this means."

He wanted to sink into the shadows and be swallowed by the earth. Edwin wanted to get away from this place. He wanted to disappear.

"Ambient," Edwin whispered suddenly.

"What is it?"

"Do you think we're evil?" Edwin looked way up at him. His voice was small, barely projecting itself. "Are we the bad guys in this story?"

"Well, it certainly has turned out that way. Hasn't it?"

Edwin swallowed. He closed his fist around the hilt of the sword at his hip once, before letting it hang uselessly at his side. It had become a source of comfort for him, the way a child always sought after their blanket. He'd close his fingers around the leather hilt and press his thumb up against the sapphire centered there, rubbing circles along the shiny blue edges of the glistening gem.

When Edwin noticed the giant's hand drawing closer to him, he stiffened. Ambient hesitated for a moment before he slipped a gloved finger underneath the other boy's chin, tilting his head up. Edwin's wide green eyes darted back and forth before they finally found Ambient's black ones in the eerily still silence.

"The others, they want your gift, Eddy. They're so desperate for a glimpse into the future, they're willing to throw away their own lives for it."

Edwin's breath caught in his chest. His voice had dwindled to a sad, miserable whisper. "I know."

"They want to use you. They want to hone your power, and they want to lock it away for themselves. You're merely a vessel to them—"

"I know."

"They'll be expecting you to turn yourself in. They'll be expecting you to do what they think is right. Because that's what you do, Eddy. For as long as I've known you, you've always done the right thing for everyone else."

Edwin wished Ambient would lower his hand and let him drop his gaze to the ground again. The longer Edwin stared at his own reflection in those dark coffee eyes, staring back at him with such helplessness, paralyzed by fear, the more he wanted to bash his skull into the wall behind him.

"So let's do what they're least expecting from us," Ambient said, a glint of hunger flashing in his eyes that Edwin had never seen before. It chilled him to the bone.

"It's your game now, Eddy," Ambient smirked. "Let's be the bad guys."