Path of Dragons

Floating in the center of the cave, with huge strands of kelp tickling his skin, Elijah focused on the facets of his mind. For the most part, they were identical. Nine incarnations of the same diamond-like gem. He knew that representation was all in his imagination, but he also knew it was real. The metaphysics of it were beyond his understanding, but one certainty was that just because something was imaginary didn't mean it wasn't real.

Moreover, that imagery was incredibly important. It was why he'd spent months perfecting the next step.

In any case, Elijah spent the next few minutes examining each facet in turn. The first five were pristine. Milky white, perfectly cut, and so clear he could see into their center. Those were the facets he used for normal, everyday activities, and they'd not been polluted by his ongoing trauma. Their appearance reflected that reality.

The next two were slightly cloudier, though the color remained the same. Tiny black-and-red tendrils spread across the surface, like a web of hairline cracks. That was the result of all the pain and suffering that had spilled over from the other, more dedicated facets. It wasn't enough to ruin them, but it had affected them enough to change how they were represented.

And finally, there were the last two.

The eighth had nearly been overcome by the darkness, and to the point where the white surface was barely even visible. However, the truly distressing facet was the ninth, which looked more like a monstrous lump of coal than a gem. It pulsed with malevolence and pain, and even focusing on it sent sharp stabs of agony through the rest of Elijah's mind.

Much of his spare time over the past couple of months had been dedicated to examining it, and as a result, he was more than accustomed to the consequences of doing so. The pain wasn't just physical, though there was plenty of that. It was psychological as well. A thousand worries wrapped around a conglomerate of loss, grief, and guilt.

There were other emotions, too. All the stuff he was too busy to properly deal with. By all rights, if he'd let it loose, rather than quarantining it in its own facet, he'd have become a gibbering mess. He would have been completely incapable of living normally, much less meeting his responsibilities.

In the beginning, he hadn't even realized what he was doing. Quarantining all that negativity just made sense, and it allowed him to keep going. It had probably saved his life. The middle of a tower or Primal Realm was no place to deal with one's trauma, after all.

It wasn't difficult to see how it could have clouded his thinking and influenced his actions. Most recently, he'd allowed himself to be baited into a trap by Gunnar. Would he have been so vulnerable if he'd not been infected by that trauma facet? Maybe. But Elijah didn't think so.

People had been compartmentalizing their issues since humanity gained sapience, but Elijah had taken it to an extreme.

But now, it was time to deal with it.

If he hadn't been submerged, he might have taken a deep, steadying breath. But as it was, he just grit his teeth and got started.

It wasn't as simple as diving into each facet, rooting out the trauma, and dealing with it. Mind cultivation was far more complicated than that, and the first step was to break each facet. He had no intention to do so all at once, and instead, focused on the first and cleanest facet.

Even that one had been partially infected by his trauma. Likely, it was the result of pain spillover. There had been a few times when every single facet had been occupied by torturous agony, and that had left its mark.

Breaking the facet was normally impossible. However, Elijah had spent quite a lot of time researching the methods, and through each one wove a common thread.

Ethera.

Lots and lots of ethera.

Elijah started by opening the single aperture associated with the first facet. Meanwhile, he forced the others closed, which was no easy feat. It was kind of like winking, though employing muscles rarely used and with nine eyes. To do it properly, Elijah had been forced to practice for months. But by now, he'd mastered the technique, so he had only a little difficulty, and that stemmed from the focus required. As it turned out, his training was not wasted, and he managed it easily enough.

A torrent of dense ethera came pouring into that aperture – so much that it threatened to erode the mental structure. Yet, Elijah had practiced that as well, so he bore it without issue. Most of his focus remained on the flood of energy. Normally, it would have gone straight into his soul, either to be used in one of his spells or to refill his core.

Elijah didn't let it follow that normal path, though. Instead, he forced it into that first facet. At first, it was only mildly uncomfortable, but that quickly progressed to true pain. It was like he had a cyst in his mind, slowly filling until it was ready to burst. He continued to funnel ethera into the gem-like structure until the pain became almost unbearable.

And he couldn't just siphon that agony into its own facet like he normally would. Instead, he was forced to feel everything. No filters. No distractions. Just unmitigated pain that felt as if it was going to burst his very soul from within.

But Elijah had never been a stranger to pain. Even before the world had changed, he'd spent his youth as an amateur boxer. He couldn't count the number of times he'd come home with black eyes. Or busted lips. Or even a few broken noses, largely because his fights weren't always limited to the ring.

Thankfully, he'd grown out of that last bit, adopting a mellower attitude. But the lessons remained. He was accustomed to pain, and his later experiences dealing with cancer, chemotherapy, and radiation had only served to bolster that inoculation. Finally, there were his first experiences after Earth had felt the touch of the World Tree. Back then, he'd had no mind cultivation to protect him. Suffering had been an everyday thing.

The end result was that if there was anyone in the world who could deal with the pain he'd just forced upon himself, it was him.

He forged ahead, and the flow of ethera never wavered. Neither did his resolve. The first crack nearly broke his concentration, though. The second almost sent him careening into unconsciousness. And yet, he hung on, bolstered by the dense vitality within the cave.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

And then, suddenly, the facet shattered, the pieces dissipating into nothingness. Elijah did black out then, but only for an instant. The torrent of pain wouldn't allow unconsciousness, though. Remnants of almost a decade of injuries, bits and pieces of being stabbed, ripped apart, and digested descended upon him like malevolent ghosts. He felt them all anew.

It lasted for more than an hour, and by the end, Elijah was sobbing uncontrollably. In a brief bout of clarity, he was glad that he was submerged. And that no one was around. He wasn't afraid to weep, but this was different. No one could maintain any semblance of dignity under such torture.

Dread suffused eight facets of his mind as he considered one simple fact – he'd only just begun. He still had eight more to go. And the first was the least of what he'd need to endure.

Briefly, Elijah succumbed to another emotion. Doubt gripped him. What if he wasn't strong enough to complete the process? What if it overwhelmed him? What if he just wasn't capable?

He pushed those aside.

No. He dealt with them. He considered the implications, and he worked through his doubts. They fell, destroyed by his resolve. If he failed, he failed. There was no reason to worry about that until he needed to do so.

Elijah moved on to the next facet. Like the first, it was relatively clean, and the process of shattering it was almost identical. The torture lasted a bit longer. Maybe two hours instead of one. But Elijah dealt with it all the same. In some ways, it was easier the second time around.

Or maybe that was just a coping mechanism to guard against the fear building in his heart.

The third facet was much, much worse. Not because of the ghosts of the physical pain that had spilled over into that facet, but rather, due to the psychological anguish. Remnants of guilt, of grief and loss – they weren't particularly potent, but there was enough to twist his stomach into knots. The only saving grace was that those feelings were formless, attached to no concrete memories. If he'd been forced to relive their source, it would have been far worse.

The fourth and fifth facet followed that same pattern. The pain – both mental and physical – grew progressively worse, but so too did his resilience. However, nothing could have prepared him for the sixth facet.

It was the first one to show visible signs of trauma, but that was a poor indicator for the deluge that washed over him. He seized as the pain of a thousand injuries gripped him. Flashes of the associated memories assailed him as well, ripping through his thoughts and forcing him to relive it all.

And this time, there was no convenient quarantine to save him.

The first half hour was the worst of it, but that was more due to the surprise than anything else. As time went on, the pain built to a crescendo, reaching a collective peak that he never thought possible. Individually, they were nothing. Mere echoes of what he'd already experienced. But together? The sheer volume of pain was enough to break a man's mind.

Elijah held on, though.

He was too stubborn to surrender.

So, he endured. The worst of it wasn't the physical pain, even if it made up the bulk the torrent. Rather, the truly agonizing bits came from his mental torment. At times, it felt like he was reliving the root events. Or maybe it was like looking at them in a mirror, only that reflection affected him deeply.

This time, the suffering lasted for more than half a day, but it felt like an eternity. By the time the explosion of emotional anguish and physical pain faded, Elijah was a trembling wreck. If he could have stopped there, he would have. However, after losing six facets of his mind, his mental landscape was a mess, and if he left it alone, it would all collapse. And if that happened, he wasn't certain if he'd recover.

There was no choice but to forge ahead.

The seventh facet was exponentially worse. If he'd been forced to endure that without the preparation of the sixth, he'd have broken. Mentally, physically, and spiritually. It lasted an entire day. Maybe longer. Elijah normally had a good sense for passing time, but without context and with the frequent blackouts that came from the torture, he wasn't really sure how long it took.

The eighth facet was worse still.

With that penultimate facet, he didn't even attempt to track the passing time. He couldn't have, even if he'd tried.

In his youth, Elijah had often pondered the nature of Hell. Back then, he'd been fascinated by it. And when his parents had died, his musings on the afterlife had taken a decidedly dark turn. The notion of burning for all eternity was, in a word, horrific. The implied torture of it was so overwhelming that it lacked any sort of context. It was almost meaningless.

Or it had been until Elijah felt that eighth facet shatter, releasing a torrent of anguish for which he was totally unprepared. None of the other facets that had come before came even close to what he felt. It was as if a wildfire had erupted, torn across his body, consumed his mind, and ravaged his soul. In those first few moments, he had some of the context he'd once lacked.

And it was so much worse than he could have imagined.

It scoured him down to the very core of his identity, leaving nothing but a burned husk behind. He broke, collapsing in on himself so completely that he lost all contact with the world around him.

Even after that eruption of anguish faded, the aftereffects remained. Like fallout after the detonation of a nuclear bomb, it hovered over him, infecting his every thought. For the longest time, Elijah had no idea what to do. In fact, he wasn't even capable of realizing that something needed to be done. He just floated in the center of the cave, his mind blank as the echoes of his torment continued to tear through him.

Then, at last, he climbed free of that morass. Hours – perhaps even days – passed before he focused on the fallout. It was comprised of tiny grains of particulate, each one representative of one instance of trauma he'd endured.

He grabbed hold of one, holding it between his metaphorical fingers, and suddenly, a memory emerged. It was just after his parents had died. Numbness spread through him until he finally came to terms with what he had been told.

He would never see them again.

No more hikes in the forest. No more sage advice from his father. Comforting hugs from his mother. They would never be there to tell him it would all be okay, that his problems weren't as monumental as they seemed. They would never see him graduate from high school. They would never see him go to college. Or a thousand other moments – big or small – that defined a person's relationship with their parents.

That was when the anger came. A wrath so terrible that it was all-consuming. In context, Elijah knew that it would drive him toward self-destruction. Breaking up with Lucy was only the smallest part of it. There was drinking. Numbing his pain by pretending he was happy. Abandonment of things he'd once held dear. And eventually, it would send him to Hawaii, where he spent so much time separated from the only real family he had.

Each grain of a memory hit him, one after another. It was like reliving those events – or emotions – all over again. He felt the grief. The guilt. The sheer weight of it all. It was enough to crush a man.

Then, finally, it was over.

After some indeterminate amount of time, Elijah's thoughts pieced themselves back together. There was still one more facet to go, and he knew it would be the worst of them all. However, before he tackled that obstacle, he took a moment to wonder what was going on. By all rights, those memories should not have been there. They preceded his faceted mind, and, in some instances, by decades. Yet, the trauma remained.

He didn't have time to ponder that problem. Instead, he pushed ahead, flooding the ninth and final facet with enough ethera to shatter it. Doing so came with the now-familiar torrent of pain. Elijah found it unbearable, and yet, he had no choice but to shoulder that burden.

Days passed. Maybe as much as a week. And it did not end. It was like being sandblasted by the echoes of remembered torment. But he couldn't stop it. He couldn't run from it. He could only endure.

But then, suddenly, it all ended. He blinked, then raised his head to find himself sitting on his old bed in his childhood bedroom. The same old posters – mostly from his sister's favorite bands – decorated his walls. There was a shelf with his boxing awards. A couple of little league trophies. His old desk. Discarded clothes decorated the carpeted floor, and sunlight streamed through a window.

Dust motes danced in the light.

Then, the door opened with a familiar creak.

And there she was.

"Alyssa?" he croaked, his throat raw from all the screaming.