The Madman's Guide to Miracles

The sound ricocheting off the vault stone was a wet, wheezing laugh, like a man drowning in his own spit.

Aldren took a step back, Richard’s stolen boots scraping slate. The rusty dagger trembled in his grip as ice bloomed across the dirty metal, turning wet blood to frost.

"What did you do?" Aldren spat through Richard’s throat. "The ritual was complete! The heart should have dissolved your soul!"

Aseren didn’t give him a answer. His eyes were totally shot the left one wide and staring at a burning siege tower in a trench that wasn’t there, the right one squinting at a dead spider on the floor.

"Who left the fridge open?" Aseren giggled, his voice dropping into a raspy, pitch-bent register. He took a heavy step, misjudged his own weight by about ten tons, and almost tripped over his own feet. He caught himself on the altar, cracking the stone like dry bread. "It’s freezing. My soup’s getting cold."

He rapped his knuckles hard against his collarbone. Tap-tap... TAP.

"My lord—"

The remaining two monks acted on instinct. They rushed him from both sides, one lunging with a jagged piece of slate aimed at his ribs while the other dove for his knees.

Aseren didn’t even look at them. He just stood there, grinning at the ceiling.

Then his aura hit.

It was a sudden, suffocating change in the room’s atmosphere—a thick, stagnant weight that tasted like copper and old burials. The pressure slammed into the vault so hard the candles instantly snuffed out.

The monk aiming for his knees froze mid-air, his bowels instantly releasing as his brain was flooded with pure, unadulterated primal horror. The sheer, effortless bloodlust rolling off Aseren made the air feel like liquid lead. Both monks collapsed onto the slate, clutching their own throats, vomiting violently as their hearts tried and failed to match the jagged double-beat pounding in Aseren’s chest.

"You’re in my spot," Aseren whispered to the monk on the left.

A sudden gap in perception, a brief blur, and Aseren’s hand was buried wrist-deep in the monk’s jaw.

BOOM.

"W-Wait—!"

The uncontrolled Ether in his chest vented straight through his arm, painting the back wall with a wet, dark mist.

CRACK.

"Ghk—!"

"Ahh... so this is how they do it," he murmured to himself.

Aseren stood frozen in the spray, blinking through the red film coating his face. He held his dripping hand up to his eye, turning it side to side.

"Hey," he rasped, looking down at the second monk who was sobbing in his own mess on the floor. "Did you see where I put my shoes?"

He stepped on the monk’s head without looking.

CRUNCH.

A muffled gasp escaped him, followed by a weak, broken sound.

"I-I surrender! P-Please!"

"AGHK—!"

Another step.

Aurelia pressed herself flat against the cold altar, clutching her crushed ribs, terrified to even breathe. ’Just what is going on with him? I need to figure out how to bring this bastard back to his senses.’

"How pitiful... If your shell is already hollow, then I suppose I’ll have to make use of it myself." Aldren growled, stepping over the corpses and bringing the broadsword up with both hands.

Aldren drove a brutal horizontal strike straight for Aseren’s neck.

Aseren barely reacted to the swing. He leaned into the arc, tilting his head like a dog trying to place a strange sound.

CLANG.

The steel bit two inches into his shoulder before grinding against his collarbone, where a void-black Mark flashed beneath the skin. The shockwave rattled straight back up the blade, tearing the flesh on Richard’s palms.

With the broadsword wedged deep in his shoulder, Aseren turned his head slowly, grinning until his back gums showed. Blood leaked out of his ear, but he looked like he just remembered a funny story.

"Oh, nice," Aseren wheezed, his voice layering over a strange, echoing hum. "A prop. I love theatre."

He clamped a bare hand around Richard’s throat, squeezed until the neck bones groaned, and slammed the knight face-first into the slate, shattering the bedrock beneath them.

Richard’s jaw shattered against the stone, but Aldren’s essence refused to yield the host.

Even with his skull fractured, the corpse twitched, Richard’s hands clawing uselessly at the bedrock as black, oily smoke began spewing from his mouth and eyes. The stolen spirit was trying to tear itself free, forced out by the sheer kinetic weight of the slam.

Aseren kept his grip. His fingers dug deeper into the torn flesh and crushed windpipe, holding Richard’s neck like an iron vise.

"Going somewhere?" Aseren asked, his voice pitching up into that unsettling, sing-song cadence. "We haven’t done dessert."

Aseren flexed his chest, forcing the double-pulse in his ribs to hammer directly into the floor. The unsynchronized black Ether surging through his arm smashed through the corpse and acted like a violent vacuum, grabbing Aldren’s leaking soul by the throat and yanking it backward into the physical world.

The black smoke shrieked. It wasn’t a sound in the air; it was a high-pitched scraping noise inside the skull, like nails dragged across slate.

"GET OFF ME!" Aldren’s spectral voice echoed through the vault, raw with actual panic.

"YOU’RE A HOLLOW THING! YOU CAN’T HOLD A SOUL LIKE MINE!"

"Too loud," Aseren grumbled, wincing as if a gnat had buzzed into his ear.

He drove his free fist straight into the center of the black smoke.

BOOM.

The shockwave blew the remaining dust off the ceiling, forcing Aurelia to cover her eyes as a gale of ice-cold wind swept the chamber. The pressurized Ether in Aseren’s hand ignited on contact with the spirit, instantly smothering the oily essence.

Aldren’s soul was dragged straight into Aseren’s palm. The black smoke twisted and screamed as it was pulled down into his Soul Core. For a brief moment, Aldren thought he’d escaped.

Then he felt where he’d ended up.

Inside him.

The double-beat in Aseren’s chest gave one massive, violent THUMP—so hard that a thin line of black blood squirted straight out of his nose, splattering onto the ruined corpse beneath him.

Aseren stayed on his knees over Richard’s lifeless shell for a long time. His head hung low, his shoulders rising and falling in shallow, ragged twitches. The void-black wells of his eyes flickered, the black static slowly receding until his natural pupil showed through the haze, dull and completely exhausted.

Tap-tap... TAP.

His right hand moved on pure muscle memory, rapping hard against his collarbone. Once. Twice. Forcing his blood pressure to settle before his brain boiled in his own skull.

Tap-tap... TAP.

Slowly, Aseren stood up. He swayed on his feet, misjudging his footing twice before his legs finally remembered how to hold a human frame. He reached up, grabbed the broadsword still wedged two inches deep in his shoulder, and yanked it out with a wet slink.

He didn’t even flinch at the pain. He just tossed the heavy steel onto the floor with a dull clatter, wiping the blood from his cheek with the back of his forearm.

Aurelia held her breath, pressing her back as tight against the altar as the stone allowed. Her heart was hammering against her cracked ribs, every instinct screaming at her not to move a muscle.

He turned his head toward her. His eyes were clear now, but they were entirely hollow—drained of the battle mania, leaving behind only a terrifying, dry numbness. He looked at her broken shoulder, then down at the gold thread stitched onto her collar.

His jaw tightened.

"Tear that off," he muttered, his voice dropping into a flat, raspy drone. He shielded his eyes with his hand, wincing as if in physical pain. "The gold. Get rid of it. Smells like rot."

"What...?" Aurelia stammered, her fingers trembling over her gown.

"I said tear it off!"

The sudden, raw bark made her flinch, but as quickly as the flare hit, it died. Aseren’s face went completely blank again. He rubbed his knuckles against his chest, starting the rhythm over.

Tap-tap... TAP.

"Sorry," he droned, stepping right past her toward the exit without offering a hand. "Too bright in here. Makes my back teeth ache."

Aseren took two slow, uneven steps toward the exit before his left foot dragged across the slate, locking up completely.

He stopped.

The silence in his head didn’t last. The moment Aldren’s essence sank into his flesh, the spirit didn’t panic—it laughed. A dry, echoing sneer vibrated straight through Aseren’s jaw.

"Foolish, hollow vessel," Aldren’s voice rasped directly inside his mind, dripping with smug superiority. "You think smashing a host kills me? I am the rot in this dirt. I have ten thousand bloodlines, ten thousand bodies waiting in the valley. The moment I slide out of this meat, I will simply wake in another, and—"

Aseren tilted his head, listening to the ghost ranting in his head like someone forced to listen to a buzzing fly.

"Too many words," Aseren wheezed.

He didn’t cast a spell. He didn’t invoke a ritual. He simply unclamped the suppression on his Soul Core and let his void-black Ether flood his own internal veins.

In an instant, Aldren’s arrogance turned to sheer, screeching horror.

Wait.

Why can’t I leave?

The black Ether swallowed Aldren whole.

"You’ve overstayed your welcome."

It seeped into his spirit, tearing through everything that made him who he was. Four hundred years of memories, his name, his soul. One after another, they were stripped away until there was nothing left to hold onto.

There was no body to return to. No tether to pull himself toward another host. Whatever paths he had prepared for his next reincarnation were being torn apart along with him.

Aldren’s existence began to dissolve.

Even if he somehow escaped, there would be nowhere left for him to return to.

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