Memento Mori

The voice startled John. He had thought himself alone, lost in an endless sea of inky blackness. It was a different voice than the strange one he had heard within the dungeon. This one was softer, feminine, its tempo calmer, almost affectionate.

But his body, or whatever was left of it in this place, felt the same instinctual chill. The same icy terror, deep within.

"What kind of nightmare is this?" John wasn't trying to speak. He wasn't even sure if he could, at the moment. But his words received an answer just the same.

"This is no dream. This is the awakening."

"This is eternal rest."

There it was. The raspy, predatory voice from earlier. Both of them seemed to be emanating from the space around John, as if the darkness itself were speaking to him.

"Not so eternal for this one. Not yet."

"Not until we finish it!"

"Stay your fangs. This one's story is not over."

"He trespasses!"

"Yes. But his transgression is not intentional."

"No mercy. No tolerance! We have allowed them too much."

"Still your mind, Hallahae. Your wrath is earned, but not by this one."

"Not all mortals earn my wrath. But all earn my bite."

John finally saw something beyond darkness, and for all the relief it brought him to no longer be drifting through eternity, he found himself longing for the return of oblivion. What had been a constant, total darkness coalesced into a misty veil, and from within that veil emerged a figure that John's mind did not recognize, but his instincts screamed and thrashed at the sight of.

A… thing, he dared not call it a person, strode into sight. Its body was humanoid, yet it lacked any feature he could truly call "human." White fur covered the length of its body, save for the extremities of its limbs. It had human-like hands, but its feet were closer to elongated paws—anthropomorphic claws from some unidentifiable beast. Its face was completely hidden behind a canine-themed mask carved from night-stained wood, from which two eternally glowing eyes peered out at him.

The creature was tall and lanky, but its mere presence chilled him in ways few things ever had. At first, it towered over him, but though it did not seem to descend—nor did John notice himself rising—he found himself at eye-level with the being as it approached. Four-fingered hands clutched the shaft of an otherworldly bow carved from blue-tinted wood. It was dappled with long, sinewy threads that pulsed and swayed as if alive, mirroring the ethereal bowstring that shone with a radiance so stark it was the first thing John could see through the haze.

At its side was the other creature. John was certain it was the same one he'd seen earlier. He knew it in his mind, his soul, and whatever he had now that passed for a body. It was clear now, no hazy shade lingering in the corners of his mind. It was a towering wolf-like creature, nearly as tall as the paler one despite walking on all fours. Black fur was interwoven with flowing white designs that mimicked the sinewy white strands on the shaft of the bow carried by the humanoid figure.

The wolf prowled into view, its limbs draining away into wispy shadows, baring fangs that gleamed with the reflected light of the bow clutched by what seemed to be its partner… or its master. Upon its head was another mask of a similar texture to the one worn by its opposite, but stained white and far more sullied with ragged scratch marks. Parts of the mask even seemed to fade and wisp into nothingness, much like the wolf's limbs did as it moved. Every now and then, as the mask became less real and warped at the edges, John could see the outline of a shadowy black collar wrapped tightly around the beast's neck.

"In fact..." The pale, lanky creature leaned closer, until the slightly protruding nose of its canine mask was nearly engulfing his view. In spite of that, John could feel nothing from whatever it was that was so closely inspecting him. No breath, warm or otherwise. No body heat. It did not twitch or fidget in any discernible way; when the entity stopped moving, it was as if it had become a statue, and the silence of the void returned every time it stopped talking.

"I believe this one may yet aid us, whether purposefully or otherwise."

"Doesn't matter. Close enough to finish him. Close enough to taste him!"

"It is not our place to carry them over the line. This one has come closer than most, though… perhaps he will remember this."

The creature, the presence, the thing that was staring at John leaned back, but in the same movement, it rested its hand on what must have been his abdomen. Though he could not feel the weight of its touch, he felt a truly mortifying pain tear through him.

"John Newman. Rid us of those who defile the natural order, who think themselves our masters. Strike where I cannot reach, free Hallahae from his bindings. I would consider it a debt I would owe you… though I can offer mortals little until it is too late. But I remember the debts I am owed, and the few I have ever owed to another. Earn my favor, little mortal, and I will give you peace beyond measure, when we meet again."

John might've swallowed nervously, if he could feel anything but the blistering pain in his abdomen. Between the pain and the instinctual terror, he could scarcely process the words, but he understood enough to know one thing: He didn't want to meet this creature again. Not ever. The white-furred creature swayed slightly, as if laughing, although it made no sound.

"All things must meet me at least once, little mortal. You are fortunate enough to be allowed to leave. Go, now. I need no answer. I will know your choice when we meet again."

The two didn't seem to move, yet they retreated into the shadows all the same. A glistening blue light formed behind them, their figures dissolving into the mist as the bright azure shine washed away all else. For a moment, John saw something emerge from him, from the body he could not perceive. A faint green tether, stretching out into the darkness that they were vanishing into, reaching toward that obscured blue light. At the same time, a golden brilliance was forming just out of sight, somewhere adjacent to him. He could not move, could not turn his head to see its source. All he could do was groan, spasm, and finally, scream, as the light blinded him and the pain became all-consuming.

"Get the fuck- ahhh!"

John jerked to awareness in the literal sense, the motion sending a rippling pain through his abdomen so great it felt as if he were being torn asunder. It also elicited a startled gasp from the healer attending him, whose hands had been placed on his lower half before his violent rising. John's hands instinctively crossed in front of his chest, heart racing, eyes scanning wildly. His vision was clear, but his mind was reeling, that primal terror still clutching at him. By the time he had recovered enough to lower his guard, the healer was already hastening out the door, leaving it wide open and allowing John to hear his frantic footsteps fading down the hall.

"Fuck, I'm... where... the infirmary?" John mumbled, glancing around and taking in his surroundings properly now, rather than searching them for inhuman threats. His mind and heart slowly worked to calm themselves, both slowing until he could hear something in his thoughts besides the beat of war drums.

"What was that? Was it… real?" John thought to himself, breaths still coming in deep pulls as he tried to acclimate to the fact that the shadows were no longer chasing him. "How much of it, though? I'm not even sure how much of the last few days was real anymore. And… what if I'm still dreaming?"

The thought was a troubling little thing, and not one he knew how to rid himself of easily. If pinching would've woken him up, that ripping pain in his abdomen surely would have done it. Which, actually...

His eyes trailed downward, fixing on where the pain had been concentrated. His haphazard awakening had disturbed the healer's work; John hesitantly reached down and folded away the crumpled blanket, revealing what lay beneath. To his relief, there was no gaping wound, no bloody mess to occupy another dark corner of his mind already crowded with gruesome trauma.

There was, however, something else that surprised and disturbed him. Just right of center mass, John now bore a scar, one that ran from his hip to just beneath his ribs. It wasn't overly pronounced, lacking any protrusions or ridges, but it was a clear and defined red-and-brown silhouette all the same. His trembling thoughts matched the wound to the last vision he'd had before darkness took him—the **** knight's greatsword, run cleanly through him.

John wondered if he had a matching scar on his back. As the taste of bile began to rise in his throat, he found himself grateful that there was no mirror within reach to tempt him into checking.

"I've lost whole chunks of me before and never come away with a mark, let alone this. Lerianna doesn't even have a scar—not one I've seen, anyway—and part of her torso was straight-up vaporized." John swallowed heavily, forcing down the bile rising in his throat. "I've lost entire limbs and never scarred like Adantia. If this happened, how close was I…? Those creatures… Was that real? What were they? Could they have been… The book!"

John tapped through his inventory pages rapidly, ignoring the stomach-churning sight of the emptied potion bottles that were a testament to his shame. Had he truly drunk that many? He could barely remember using them at all...

He continued until he found the tome he was looking for near the end of the book collection resting in one of his lesser-used tabs: the so-called "Divine Encyclopedia." It had been so long since he'd studied it that he'd forgotten most of the names contained within, but something about the pages tickled at the back of his mind. John cracked the book open, but had barely skimmed the first few pages before a voice reached his ears.

"Unbelievable fool. If he really is awake, I'm going to put him back out myself! The absolute nerve of it all. The first thing I'm going to do is throttle him, and then-"

John had never been so grateful to be threatened. The pounding steps and the gauntlet-clad hand that slammed the door fully open broke him from the terrifying conclusions waiting at the end of that train of thought. Moira's face, a mask of terror forcefully knit into sternness, froze at the sight of him. Her oft-unstoppable momentum came to a grinding halt. For a long moment, the two of them just stared at each other.

"John, you obstinate, reckless, stubborn, heedless little cretin!" Moira boomed, storming across the room. Her words resounded with such fury that John's hands clutched the book spread across his lap, crinkling the pages as he braced for impact. Moira drew her arms back as she covered the final yards, armor clanking. Her hands slammed into John's back as she clasped him against her chest tightly enough to steal the breath from him.

"You ignorant, devil-may-care little fool," she whispered, the venom in her voice gone, leaving only a flicker of annoyance as she held him. Warm spots of wetness formed against the back of his shoulder, growing with each moment she clung to him. "I thought I had lost you."

"I thought you had too," John admitted quietly. "I'm sorry, Moira."

"Sorry does not account for one-thousandth the atonement I expect for this," Moira said sternly. She sniffled a few more times, then let a deep silence settle over them as she composed herself. She eventually shifted her grip and pulled back, keeping her hands tightly bound to his shoulders, a weight holding him back from any further suicidal ideas.

"I know," John whispered.

"You've always done this. You've always pushed yourself too hard, too fast, for too little. I've warned you about it a thousand times!"

"I know."

"You-" Moira paused, blinking slightly at the lack of reaction. "You very nearly died, John! You were dead! We only just barely managed to bring you back!"

"I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

"I... I should have..." Moira hesitated, some of the righteous anger flowing out of her. "I should have pinned you down. Tied you up, something, anything! The only reason I didn't was because I convinced myself you had some semblance of coherence left in you... or, failing that, that you'd pull yourself out of it through some manner of Gaia-given luck, like you always do. No more! The next time I think you're stepping out of line, I'm chaining you up in the dungeons myself!"

John might have smiled, if he felt her warnings were anything resembling a joke. "I wish you had. I wish I hadn't put you through all that. You won't have to tie me up, Moira. I'll listen next time, I swear. I-I never want to feel like that again."

"Bah, you've never listened to me, I don't expect you to start now." Moira glared at him, but a streak of concern seeped through her fury. "...Feel like what, though?"

"Feel like I'm not myself," John said quietly. "Feel like I have to keep moving, or it's all going to fall down around me."

"Fear and anxiety do that to us. Makes it difficult to listen to reason, even from those we trust, when it's strong enough," Moira cautioned. "But you usually hold yourself together better than this, John. Even in situations that would break most others."

"I wasn't afraid. I mean, I am, but I'm not... I'm not making decisions based on that. Sophia and Lerianna already beat that out of me a while ago," John admitted. He stared down at his hands, startled at how surprised the sight made him. How unusually clearly he could see them, how little they were shaking, how fine his control over each flex of his muscles now felt. "I trust everyone. I'm terrified of someone getting hurt, but that's not why I was pushing so hard. Or why I was so rude to everyone. I thought I was past all this; even my grief has gotten better, I don’t understand why I was so freaked out! Gaia, I snapped at Etriyya over nothing, like I was-"

"I believe I can fill in some of the answers you're lacking." The cool, even tone was a steady anchor for John's worried thoughts. Tricia strode into the room accompanied by a half-dozen drones. One moved in front of her, projecting a display of biometrics that John could only assume to be his own.

"Do you mean there really was something wrong with him? Beyond pushing himself like an absolute fool?" Moira asked, her skepticism palpable.

"The foolishness was the cause, but for once, it is not entirely his own fault that things went so far," Tricia corrected, gesturing to a holographic chart that appeared beside the biometrics. "We may have discovered an oversight in your Gamer's Body ability. In short, your body’s normal stress responses have no ‘off’ switch. What you see here are two bar graphs. One displays your normal, unaltered hormonal levels; they're perfectly in line with a healthy adult male. The second one displays the results of the readings I took after you returned from that final Dungeon Barrier."

John stared at the two. The difference was stark, even if he knew few of the names, and nothing useful regarding their concentration levels. "It's all elevated. Makes sense. I was training for five days, and… well, dying."

"You were dead," Tricia corrected without a hint of empathy. "And this explains why you were not acting like yourself in those final days. Gamer's Body prevents biological failure on multiple fronts, even when not inflicted on you by an attack. Heart attacks, strokes, organ shutdown… your ability seems to interpret these as damage and simply negates them. However, it does not seem to recognize a hormonal overload as a problem."

She pointed to the second graph, where every bar was a screaming shade of red. "Your physiology treats hormonal depletion as an 'injury' to be healed. Each time your adrenal system ran dry, your ability refilled it instantly. You were mainlining cortisol and adrenaline for five straight days."

"So he was in a constant state of panic?" Moira asked, her expression shifting from anger to a grim understanding.

"Beyond panic. A state of biological stress physiologically unattainable for a normal human," Tricia elaborated. "Your ability insulated you from catastrophic organ damage, but it also allowed you to keep going, overloading your nervous system and your conscious mind with constantly intensifying levels of stress. Any normal person would have simply collapsed from exhaustion days ago... but because you no longer require sleep, you were able to keep going. And because your body could instantly replenish your adrenal system, you never stopped flooding your system."

John stared down at his hands, which were surprisingly steady now. "I didn't even realize how bad it was getting until the end. I just thought I was losing my form. I didn't notice all the signs... looking back on it now, I feel so stupid. Everyone else could see it, but I just lashed out any time someone mentioned it."

Tricia nodded. "What you experienced would have had profound effects on your mind. It's fairly impressive that you were as controlled as you were. The psychological impact of hormone levels like this would be severe. Paranoia, aggression, impaired judgment, memory loss, loss of fine motor control. For all intents and purposes, you were experiencing a moderate and very unique form of psychosis induced by your own powers. "

"That would explain why I didn’t get a status message warning me about some debuff, I guess. Even when my abilities were starting to mess up,” John admitted. “My powers didn’t see anything wrong. I should have, though. It’s been so long since I was tired naturally, that by itself should have told me something was wrong.”

“By the time your mental state was impaired enough to begin affecting your natural mana flows, you would already have lost all reasonable sense of judgment,” Tricia instructed. “You are not blameless in these matters, John, but you are not entirely responsible for the lengths they reached, either; I cannot understate the degree to which you would have been affected by the time you were wounded. The fact that you were able to function at all is an impressive feat. It's likely that the **** nature of this particular problem, and the inability of Gamer's Body to rectify it as an 'injury', is why it took so long for you to wake up.”

“How long was I out, exactly...?" The wariness in John's voice was enough to make even Tricia's lips curl, if only for an instant.

"Forty-seven hours."

"Two fucking days?!"

"That would be an approximately accurate rounding, yes," Tricia said levelly.

"Fucking- damn it, I lost so much time! I have to get home, everyone is going to be worried sick-"

"Curse you, John Newman, you're lying down for the first time in a week, and I nearly had to watch you die to get you here!" Moira barked, planting her hand on John's chest with enough strength to **** the breath out of him. "You're not going anywhere! We've already been in contact with the others."

"You let them know I'm okay?" John remained tense, waiting for confirmation before he could let the relief fully wash over him.

"We did... once we were certain you would live," Moira confirmed, her features condensing from the weight of uncertainty she'd been **** to bear on his behalf. "They are anxious, but happy to know that you are alive. They will be overjoyed to hear that you've regained at least some measure of sense, I'm sure."

"Thank Gaia," John groaned, finally allowing himself to relax.

Moira kept her hand on him for a few seconds longer, giving him a wary look before reluctantly releasing him again. "Now, John, if you don’t mind my asking… what compelled you to dig out this tome in particular?"

John craned his head back to look at the book still resting on his lap. His attempt to sit up, and Moira’s firm hand, had uncovered enough of the book’s title to be recognizable.

"Ah, right. I read over this a while back, when I spent the day in the library and you were nice enough to loan a few of them out to me," John began, slowly turning the pages, studying the images on each for a few moments before flicking to another. "It's been a while, and my mind is still a little rough, but while I was out, I had a- well, I don’t know what it was. A dream, maybe, but it might have been something more. I saw a creature that seemed familiar. Something that reminded me of a picture in this, I think. Something-"

John's tongue froze as a tendril of ice snaked its way along his nervous system. That same frosty terror, not as ferocious now, but fueled by the realization that what he was looking at was real—that some part of his nightmare had not been left behind.

"That," John said simply, tapping the page hard enough to crinkle it. "I saw that."

There, on a page so detailed it came with a full magically-drawn sketch, was a creature almost identical to what he'd seen. The black mask upon its face stared into his soul. He could have sworn he heard a distant howl as he pressed himself back into the overly firm mattress of the infirmary.

"...Ereshkigal. The Night Watcher. The Guardian of the Underworld. Hell's Sentinel," Moira remarked, listing off the heading and titles underneath. There was a familiarity in her voice, but she showed no sign of the righteous dread that engulfed John now. "You saw this?"

"I did. I saw her, and I saw this one, too." John flipped a few pages ahead, both to banish the first image from his mind and to seek out the other. Further along, listed underneath the Shards of the same aspect, he found another, even more detailed drawing. This one was crafted so clearly it could have been a photograph. A lupine shadow with long, inky fangs and an azure glow radiating from its eyes like the killing intent he could see scrawled across its abyssal muzzle.

"Hallahae, the Black Dog of ****." This time there was a note of worry in Moira's voice, and not all of it for the creature. "You are certain these are what you saw?"

"I could have described these pictures to you down to the very last detail," John swore solemnly. "Moira, Tricia… you said I was dead?"

Moira remained silent, her eyes not leaving the page, something deeply unsettled in her expression. Even Tricia seemed bothered now, though she responded when Moira did not.

"That would be accurate, yes," Tricia confirmed. "Your cardiac and pulmonary organs experienced a critical failure shortly after you collapsed. Clinically speaking, you were dead for approximately eight minutes."

John nodded slowly. He let his eyes drift away from the other two, returning to the image of that midnight-black wolf and the ivory mask resting atop its skull.