Hurling all over the stump, I groaned as I realized I now had nothing to sit on.

Why’d I throw up on that stump…? Gods I was dumb sometimes…

Wiping my face, I sighed with a little bit of relief. Although I still felt… sick, having thrown up finally made me feel better.

Coughing a bit, I glanced around for the bucket of water I had drawn earlier. Where had I left it…? Ah. There it was. Near my bag.

I walked over to it, and was about to cup my hand into it as to fetch some water to drink… but saw the gore upon it.

“Right…” I mumbled as I looked around for something to use as a bowl or spoon. There was a larger table nearby, one that the cultists had been using for their meals, and it did indeed have food and drink aplenty on it… but I knew better than to eat any of that stuff.

But I didn’t need to eat the food or drink from their cups, did I?

Walking over to the table, I tried not to look too closely at the meat on the plates. It looked… a little too fresh. A little to normal. Why did human meat look so similar to a cow’s or a deer’s?

No matter. I picked up an empty cup, made sure nothing had been in it, and went to take it back to my bucket of fresh water.

In the back of my mind I knew drinking from it, even if dry, wasn’t safe. It was likely contaminated. But I didn’t acre right now. I was thirsty. Terribly so.

I carefully dipped the cup into the water, and took a drink. The cold water felt good going down my hot throat.

Taking just another drink, I placed the now empty cup down… and headed back into the church.

Chains rattled as I walked in, and it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. They didn’t like building their churches with windows, for whatever reason. Made them dark and gloomy… and made it hard to air out the stink.

“You will burn… burn and burn…” the man groaned, sounding slightly absentminded. Odds are he hadn’t even realized I had left for a moment.

“That’s just the acid. Nitric acid, to be exact. A rather strong batch of it too. A gift from Vim… one that I’ve perfected thanks to you and your ilk,” I said as I glanced at the chains connected to his wrists. They held him up, and in place… but wouldn’t for much longer. Parts of his shoulders were so melted; it’d not be long until they simply tore apart. In fact if he just… stood and twisted a bit, they’d likely tear right here and now.

He didn’t though. And wouldn’t try. I knew the man was practically dead already, at least in his mind. He was broken. They always broke.

They could deal pain, but couldn’t take it. Couldn’t comprehend it.

They thought themselves masters of pain. The best at it.

How little they knew.

“Technically you’re not burning, though. It’s more of a melting, really,” I said as I watched the acid drip down from the cloth I had rigged above him. Judging by the way it was dripping, there wasn’t much left.

No matter. He was done. Even if he somehow survived the next few hours, he’d not survive the axe I would bury into his head once I decided to stop.

The man tilted his head… and I frowned as he actually looked up at me. For the first time in hours he had focus in his gaze, and it made me shift a little.

What’s this…? Was he about to die, and this his last moments or something?

“The deep one will come for you. He will not spare you,” the man said… speaking with a voice unbothered and strong.

I glanced to the nearby table, where some of their tools of their trade laid. I debated grabbing the axe… just in case.

How did he sound so healthy? So strong? He shouldn’t even be able to draw enough breath to speak so strongly…

“You and your ilk have tortured and slaughtered thousands, for hundreds of years. Not once has any god noticed. What makes you think they will now? You think you’re more special than those you tortured…?” I asked as I walked over and grabbed the axe.

The man smirked at me. “For beings so close to the gods, you sure are blind to them. Wallow in your ignorance, child of pain,” the man said.

Wanting to scoff at him… I hesitated a moment as I heard something bubble.

Turning my head, I frowned at the sight of the iron bucket. One hanging over a long dead fireplace.

Why was it bubbling…? That fire hadn’t…

Walking over to it, I carefully approached it. There were a few other bodies nearby, his fellows, but none in my direct path.

The bubbling inside the bucket grew louder as I got near, and I found myself staring into a molten pot.

Was that metal…? It sure looked like it. It was glowing very brightly, and bubbling as if boiling… how was it doing that? There was no flame. No fire. No heat. I couldn’t even feel heat from it and I was standing right in front of it!

Some kind of illusion… maybe? A hallucination…? Maybe the acid had interacted oddly with the flesh of the man and created some kind of unseen fog of poison? It was the only thing I could…

“See…? He’s here.”

Turning, to glare at the man who sounded so cocky… I went still when I instead found only darkness.

My heart thumped up into my throat as I spun back around, to see the boiling pot of metal… and found nothing.

“What…?” I spun around, searching all around me… and found myself in utter darkness.

I was no longer in the church. No longer surrounded by the dead cultist. No longer did I smell their filth, their sickness, or the man’s flesh being melted by acid.

Just what was going on…!?

“I thank you.”

Going absolutely still, I gripped the axe in my hand… and closed my eyes. There was no wind. The air was stagnant, as if I was in some cave. Yet even as loud as the voice had been… it had not echoed. It had boomed. As if spoken by a giant, yet had not echoed in this unending darkness.

Opening my eyes, I found myself still in the darkness. I stepped forward a few steps, expecting to bump into a table or dead body. I knew there were a few nearby.

Yet as I kept walking… I found myself not hitting anything. In fact, I don’t think I was even walking on wooden floorboards anymore. Was that grass beneath my feet, or sand…? I was almost too scared to look down and verify it.

“What is going on?” I dared to ask.

For a few steps there was silence. Then the air shook again, as a loud voice spoke. “Your brutality has freed me from their minds. For that I thank you. Though… it shall not change your fate, regrettably…”

My shoulders became tense as I looked up, as to search for the source of the loud voice… but all I saw was darkness. “What are you…?” I whispered.

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“The creations call me the Deep One.”

My tense shoulders slumped and I dropped the axe. It didn’t make a sound as it fell next to me.

A god.

A real god.

Their god.

“Fear not. I am not a god.”

“Could’ve fooled me…” I whispered as I looked around. How did the voice sound like it was coming from right above me…? Yet at the same time, it seemed to be coming from everywhere else too.

The voice chuckled, which made me shiver. “Well… tis’ no surprise. Though not a god, I had been made by one.”

That didn’t make me feel any better. That meant it was a monarch. A real one. A powerful one.

But… did that mean the Epoch’s deity was just a monarch…? Not even one of the actual gods…? “You’re the god the Epoch worship. The Deep One,” I said, hoping to confirm it. If it was, maybe I could get it to answer for all the evil it’s allowed. For the terrible… the… For her…

“A faulty mistake. My creator dubbed me Dream Eater. A better moniker, but you tiny creations can’t see the truth of the world and simply do your best instead. And your best is to not understand, and not comprehend that you don’t either,” The Deep One said.

Dream Eater…? I felt like I recognized that title. Nothing came straight to mind, though.

Taking a small breath, I turned around. “What do you want…?” I asked it.

“Justice.”

I frowned at that. “I have given it. I was in the middle of giving it! You stopped me!” I shouted.

The Deep One, or the Dream Eater, didn’t respond. The darkness all around me was silent… as if judging me.

I shook my head and stepped forward, pointing up at the darkness around me. Hopefully at the god, or whatever it was. “I was getting vengeance! Your cultists… these people, your servants, are evil people! They slaughter innocents, and debase them in terrible ways! They even eat them alive!” I shouted.

Although I was getting heated, in anger… I stopped walking as I realized the darkness around me got a tad warmer. As if I was now standing out under the sun.

Was I maybe not actually somewhere else then…? Maybe I was still there, by that church, and I just couldn’t tell or see it…

“I believe you, son of Amber’s whims. I truly believe you,” the god said gently.

“Then…?”

“Then why have I brought your mind here…? Because of you, Tosh. You did this. To yourself.”

Hearing the god say my name stunned me a little. It was such a silly little detail, but it shook me. I had not told anyone my name. none of those cultists I had poisoned, none of the ones I had killed or tortured… I never said my name to them. Which meant… somehow, it had known all along.

And that scared me for some reason.

“I… I don’t understand,” I said, barely able to think.

“You will. In time.”

Then, out of the corner of my eye… something changed.

I spun, expecting to find the god himself… or maybe some other terrible monstrosity… and instead simply found light.

A very small speck of it. Impossibly far away. Like a small lamp hanging in the middle of nowhere, was a tiny cone of light far off in the darkness.

“What…?” I whispered, trying to make heads or tails of it. What did that light mean? What was happening?

“Go on then. You killed sixty-five of my creator’s toys. So… sixty-five ticks will do.”

What…? Sixty-five…? “There were only sixteen here…” I whispered. And one of them had still been alive!

“Sixty-five. You can lie to me, but not yourself. Not your soul. I see it all. Go. Sixty-five ticks.”

“Ticks…?” I asked. What the heck did that mean!?

“Ticks. Steps. Trials. Tribulations. As I said, I seek justice. And so, I take from you sixty-five ticks. They are your punishment. A tick for every soul you reaped. Finish them or don’t. I care not. My justice has been served. My duty fulfilled. Glad too… since now I can hide from he who hunts. Finally I have freedom… but now that means…” the voice started to become quiet. Distant. Fading away, as if going down a long tunnel. “He can find me too…” the whispers faded, even though I knew the thing was still talking.

“Wait…! Wait!” I shouted, as I felt the world get colder again.

No answer came. And somehow, impossibly… I knew the thing was gone. God, monarch, or some weird apparition… it wasn’t here anymore. I had no way to explain it, but…

“Are you still there? Dream Eater?” I asked worriedly.

Silence was my answer.

Breathing quickly, I began to panic as my mind tried to make sense of what was happening.

I was stuck in darkness. Pure darkness. In a world I didn’t understand. Sent here by some… powerful creature, maybe even a god.

To be served justice. For those I have killed. I knew better than to try and deny the number. Because I knew it. I knew it well.

Sixty-five people. that was indeed how many cultists I’ve killed in my life. By my own hands, and not those I had led to their deaths by sending to their doom via Lilly or Vim or anyone else. Sixty-five was how many I had ended with my own hands.

How had it known…? Has it been watching me all this time…? Maybe it had. Maybe it had watched me through the eyes of its servants. Through the eyes of the cultists… maybe that was why it was gone now. Maybe that man had finally succumbed to his wounds, and now I was alone… wherever I was.

Looking around, I wanted to shout and scream. To defy what was happening… but I knew I couldn’t.

Vim told me the gods were real. He told me they had powers uncanny.

I just… didn’t expect it to be like this…

Gulping, I shook my head and looked again to the light. In the distance.

He called it a tick. To me a tick was a bug. Or maybe the sound a clock made, such as Hands the raccoon’s inventions. But…

Stepping forward, I hurried to the light. I wasn’t sure what this Dream Eater expected from me… but I knew better than to think I had any other choice. Or well, I probably did, but I didn’t know if I wanted to take the only other option I had just yet.

Vexli would never hold me again if I killed myself. She had seen such a thing as the ultimate sin. It was the only reason I had never done it and…

Slowing a little, I huffed as I wondered why the light was still so far away.

How long had I been running? I was covered in sweat. This made no sense.

Picking up my pace, I nearly stumbled… and slowed a little once I realized I had almost hurt myself. My muscles felt strained. Aching. In turmoil, as if I was running for my life and had been for… for…

Slowing a little, I huffed and huffed as I studied the far off light. It was bigger now. Closer. But still so, so far away. Like a mirage in the distance, never to be actually got to.

“Wait…” I gasped as I realized it.

The meaning.

Tick.

A tick.

The god had said it. It had said I would understand.

In time.

Pushing all thoughts aside I rushed forward… and ran for what felt like forever. Forever and ever… and finally, after an eternity… I reached the light.

Walking into a large area of… white, I frowned at the ground. That was sand, wasn’t it? Yet it was firm. The kind of firm that felt like dirt. But it wasn’t. it was countless tiny beads of…

Then the light disappeared.

I went still, and started to panic. No!

Then I heard it. Off in the distance… impossibly far, a sound I had no word to describe… as another light appeared.

Far off in the distance, a tiny light loomed. The same I had seen an eternity ago, back when I had first arrived here in this world of eternity.

Falling to my knees, I groaned as I grabbed at the sand. It was smooth, and cold to the touch. And somehow, impossibly, heavy. So heavy I couldn’t even throw it in anger.

“Why are you doing this…!? Just… just kill me…”

The Dream Eater didn’t respond. Like all the other times I had shouted at him in this prison of eternity, I had received no answers.

Sixty-five. Sixty-five ticks.

And I had just completed one.

Standing up, I aimed for the far off light and stepped forward. Unlike before, where I had ran with all my might… instead this time I took it slow. I counted each step.

“Two.” I whispered.

“Three.”

My plan was to count every one. To see just how far, and how long, each tick would take me… yet I ran into a problem.

Eventually each step took too long. Because it took too long to say its corresponding number.

So I simply… stopped counting… and eventually reached the light once more.

Reaching the light, I stared up at it… wondering if it was a sun, or something else. It was impossibly high, as if in a distant sky. Yet it didn’t blind me. It didn’t burn the eyes, or hrut to look at… almost as if it was fake…

Then before I could study it further, it disappeared… and that sound echoed throughout the darkness, and another far off light appeared.

Taking a deep breath, I nodded.

Okay.

Sixty-three to go.

Each one took what felt like an eternity… but it was fine.

I didn’t feel hunger. Or thirst. I didn’t even feel the aches and pains in my body anymore. All I felt was the sand beneath my feet… and heard my breath as I huffed and ran towards the next light.

As I ran, I thought of Vexli. That village. Vim. The Society.

Sally.

I thought of them all… until I ran out of things to think about… and then I simply ran some more.

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