A crushing weight attached itself to my legs and I was brought to a sudden stop. Thin, gauze-like restraints wound about my calves and knees, one branch of it fitting around my neck as crooked appendages clutched at the silver chain. 

Though the loa pried at the links, the chain held fast.

Much like the void itself, loas didn't conform to a specific shape or idea. They were amorphous, and typically chose to reflect a spirit's interpretation, not unlike an Absolian's glamour. Cuxiel had told me the loas were translucent in their natural form and I was displeased to see he was correct: I could only see the vaguest of outlines against the blackness of the void, and the sheer size of the creature was daunting.

The loa held my spirit tight as it spun silent circles in my vicinity. It reminded me a of a deep-water fish gliding in the dark of the ocean's lowest reaches. It was visible only by the arbitrary glints of light that bounced off its dim scales.

"What are you?" it said in a voice like a whetstone sliding across a dull blade. The sheer dissonance of its words was a jarring nightmare that pierced my spirit in places I hadn't been aware of moments before. I grunted in pain.

It pulled and yanked at various parts of me, and at the chain. It obviously found the line of links an object worthy of contention, and was more interested in discovering how to rip it apart than it was in me.

I thrust my hand between the loa's inspecting tendrils and the links, dissuading the creature's interest. It hummed.

The loa adopted a more humanoid form, the tendrils taking on the aspect of bladed fingers, the epidermis becoming tangible and partially scaled. Where there'd once been suggestion of presence now rose a manifested being that resembled the Baal.

I glared at the shadows still pinning in my spirit place, their origins seeming to come from the nothingness below my halted feet. It was not the Baal who was here in the void. The loa managed to capture an image of him, an imperfect rendition based upon my skewed perceptions of the King Below. As such, the loa was too tall, too large, its talons bared swords and its smile unveiling a mouth crowded with too many teeth.

"You fear this one." It drew its talon across its face, stretching the discolored skin.

I would have snorted, had I known how. 

It lifted an arm and again tapped its malformed fingers against the chain. "What is this?" the loa inquired, its curiosity palpable. As creatures of energy, loas held no conception of morality or emotion, and viewed one another as predators. They fed on the essence of "feelings," the energy of magic, and each other. The Dreaming Children had named them "the Dream's Guardians," because the loas had once served to return the essence of the Children to the Isle—back when the Isle existed.

They did understand survival, however. Cuxiel had made that clear when we'd discussed the subject of the loas, and he'd warned me against hunting them. The idea of capturing and consuming one had been intriguing, but they knew of the Sins now. They were wary.

"It keeps this one together. It holds it all in." Again the nails tapped against the chain's physical form as the loa sought to break it. "If it were not there, I could eat this one."

I bristled, but kept my anger in check. Strong emotion was what the entity sought, and if I proved too difficult a target, perhaps it would abandon me in search of an easier meal.

The loa went to touch the chain one more time and I wordlessly covered it. I was fortunate to have one arm free of the loa's bindings, though it could have pushed it aside if it'd truly wanted to. 

A shiver ran through the creature as its shape darkened and distorted again, parts of its body losing opacity as it siphoned images from the memories that floated upon the surface of my mind. It became Balthazar, and like the image of the Baal, it wasn't quite accurate.

"This one killed you." 

The entity changed again and stole Cage's grinning face. 

"Or did this one? Too many deaths. Too many lives." 

When the loa shifted for the fourth time, I was unprepared for it to shrink, features narrowing as Sara replaced the black mage's likeness. Her image was far more accurate then the others had been, and yet it held none of her vivacity, none of her color. There were cracks in the visage, as if she were eroding to dust.

The loa played thin, delicate fingers over my arm and fitted them through my own fingers, attempting to coax my hand from its place across the chain. When I refused to move, the hands rose, dancing like pale marionettes, and fell upon my jaw. Soft thumbs swept across my cheeks, my chin, my lips.

It leaned near enough that, had it been breathing, I would have felt the air slip from its mouth or nose. "This one makes you hungry," it murmured, faux-teeth digging into the inside of its cheek. "In ways you don't understand."

A fissure of anger escaped and filtered into the void in a thread of violent red. In an instant it was gone, absorbed into the invisible, manifold forms of the loa as it trembled with success. I lunged forward, past its questing mouth, and cracked my head against its skull.

The loa hadn't expected physical contact. I hadn't expected my head-butting to be successful, either.

Dazed, the creature lost her form and returned to its natural, befuddling shape. The tendrils of its being wrapped tighter about my middle until I was certain it would crush my spirit, but death was impossible in this deathless place. The things that existed here lacked any life to take.

The loa took stock of my stoic, stern demeanor and transitioned through several bodies, never wholly assuming an identity as it attempted to find one that would provoke a more lasting emotion from me. Either the complexity of my memories confused the being or Saule's spell blocked deeper intrusion within my psyche.

For whatever reason, the loa was having difficulty deciding.

The creature's attempts ended when the presence of a second entity floated nearer from the never-ending abyss. The loa stilled, the paltry ripples in its gossamer body turning to iron as the creature enfolded me in its darkness.

We'd been approached by another loa. It was a monstrous thing, a being without limit, much like the creature that'd managed to snare me, and it moved like a mountain crawling across the earth's surface.

There was a...defect to this new loa, and imperfection my keen attention spotted as soon as it granted itself enough sentience to appear. Its body—large, and more substantial—wasn't as transparent as the first loa's. Pulsating streamers of sickly green were embedded into its...side, as if a dog had ripped into the loa's hide and an infection was festering where the bite was untreated. Of course, there were no dogs in this place, metaphoric or otherwise. I had no knowledge of what could possibly injure something like a loa.

The infected loa attacked the first, and I was released as the smaller entity fled. I used the opportunity to vanish as well, chasing the urging of my goal like a puppet yanked relentlessly toward its puppeteer. I didn't even mind the usage of such a comparison when I felt the void change, a membrane of sensation pressing upon my front. Recognizing the feeling, I pressed against it in return, until the void surrendered my spirit, and I was free.

I was outside the void. I was in the Realm of Sin. 

Had the Realm not been as broken and torn as it was, my spirit wouldn't have been able to exist within it. The stillness within the frozen remnants of the Isle gave the energy that comprised a soul adequate tactility. I was vaporous and wispy—ghost-like—but I was here. I'd escaped the void. 

Extending in all directions, the Realm was a withered paradise of scorched rocks and forests of eternal flame. I knelt to drag my fingertips through the porous, familiar silt and inhaled the foul rancor of burning earth. All was quiet, unmoving. The final known act of the Wild King had frozen all of eternity into a single continuity—his familiar, The Cassandra—and he'd managed to salvage this...vestige. This smoldering ruin. 

No sky existed here, only the sightless cover of the void and its hungry, impatience darkness waiting to descend.

I held the mana ampoule within my fist, silver chain trailing between tight fingers. I set off at a run toward the flames.

Once, the Stormwood had been the mightiest of forests, an empire of gilded spires and jade paths where the Stormlians had walked with assurance and competency. The civil wars of the Children had never touched this part of their world, and thus it had always been unspoilt, until the fires were set. The once towering trees of gold and orange leaves had become torches in the Isle's fall. The timeless forest of flame gave illumination to all of the Realm as it eternally burned.

I passed beneath the fiery limbs and felt no heat, tasted no smoke. Where I would have once paused and given credence to the destruction I'd enabled, I now ran on without giving the forest an iota of my attention. I chased a path I'd taken one too many times before through the trees' remains.

A mountain now resided where the Dreaming capital of Ufiil had once been. The mountain's rigid figure parted the blazing treetop to rise solitary above the ambient swell of gray ash and red light. Seven spires of narrow, solid stone crowned the pinnacle, and from those spires issued seven lines of white light that tore straight through the void and distorted reality in their paths.

Upon that mountain were the Seats of Sin, the anchors the souls of the Sins were tied to, the pillars from which the powers of Sloth and Envy, Greed and Lust, Wrath and Pride, all stemmed.

The void appeared to dip lowered in the tor's vicinity, sucked as it was by the yawning vacuum of power created by the empty Seats.

"Soon," I breathed as the tiny ampoule warmed in my fist and my feet pounded along the cinder-clad road. My gaze remained upon the mountain's crest as I sprinted. "I am almost there! Soon!"