I have calmed down after my episode a few nights ago, or rather… I think I have simply turned numb. I don’t know.
Aunty and Sabar were there when I woke up the next day. They made breakfast, and we all ate together. No one mentioned my behaviour the night prior, they just made casual conversation like it were any other, ordinary day. I was torn between being glad it was like that or being furious; I wished to scream at them, ask them why they were acting like nothing happened, why they were not saying anything? But do I have the right? Surely, they are doing it for my sake, giving me space to feel safe enough to open up.
So I stayed quiet.
It was only in passing, while Sabar and I washed the dishes, that she suggested that I take some time off work; "You need to take your mind off things and decompress,” she said. At that moment, it felt like everything turned quiet, and I could feel Teacher and aunty’s gaze burning at the back of my head. I stood still, and it took all of my willpower to not start shaking. Why… why does it feel like I am in danger? Sabar called out my name, and I snapped out of the trance, and I agreed with her, my face an icy mask. They all smiled, telling me it was for my own good. I made the right decision.
Ever since then, I was never left alone. Wherever I went, someone was always with me. At all times. Not only Teacher, aunty, and Sabar would keep me company, but also Zaylany—who last that I remembered was working at the capital—would come visit me often. And it did not end with them; friends, acquaintances, and colleagues appeared as well, whether visiting me at home or I would run into them while I was out of the house.
It did not bother me… not really. In the rare moments I was alone, I would be seized by visceral headaches; so fierce it felt as though my brain were being split open. Yet these flare‑ups never came when I was in the company of someone.
I talked about it with Sabar one night. I was lying in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling while she was doing the last revisions to her report. “You should stop thinking too much,” she said. Even beneath the covers, I feel a chill run down my back.
Why is Sabar so dismissive?
Something is wrong.
I don’t feel like myself anymore. The headaches never leave me now—day and night, I am assaulted with stabbing pain. There is also this creeping feeling of wrongness, the fear, that do not leave me as well, and the maddening sensation that I have something important to do but cannot remember what it is no matter how much I try. I try to talk about it, but I am always dismissed, always told to relax, to rest.
Sometimes, I think I am in a separate world from everyone else; they go about their lives peacefully while I am stuck in this cage of torment.
Whenever I try to ask for help, but no one understands, as if I were speaking another language. And no one cares! Can they not see how much I am suffering? Why am I the only one feeling like this? It’s not fair!
Am I… losing my grip on reality?
Maybe they are right… Maybe I should try more keeping my mind off things. I should… I should stop thinking all these unnecessary thoughts… It is certainly less uncomfortable the times when I do.
“Will you look at this…” Aunty stands near me at the kitchen counter; in her hands is a tray of freshly baked biscuits—my personal favourite. “This might very well be our best batch yet, don’t you think?”
I nod. She deposits them in a jar, then pushes the entire thing into my arms. “These are for you.”
“…I thought we were making these for everyone.”
“Well, I have decided that they are for you now.” She taps my nose. “Do not think that I don’t see how listless you have been. You have always been of the repressed type—you worry too much. You have me, your father, Sabar and Zaylany, isn’t that enough? Stop overthinking so much.” She smiles. “So have them, you will feel much better.”
“…Thank you.”
“—Where are you going?” She asks when I start heading for the door.
“I’ll be right back aunty.” I close the door behind me before she gets to say another sentence.
I walk quickly, my heartbeat quickening with tandem with my steps.
Everyone has been telling me to stop overthinking… Over and over and over and over again! They all keep repeating the same thing as if it is the only thing they know to say.
With each step, my headache redoubles with intensity.
No one listens to me. They ignore me when I tell them that something is wrong.
I have been eating a lot these days—that’s what I do when I am stressed out. Aunty knows that and has always scolded me for the bad habit, but now she lets me, in fact, it feels like she encourages it. And not only her, but the others as well.
Sometime later, I find myself at the station and board the first available SCPLE, then disembark at the first stop announced. It is a small town, south-east to Jin’raeh. I don’t go into town; I summon my staff and fly out into the wilderness.
Aunty would never let me eat as a coping mechanism—she would never encourage it. Teacher, Sabar, and Zaylany would never ignore me knowing I was not alright, they would not be acting like everything was fine. They would have sought the help of a professional to help me and not simply keep me home. No one is acting normally.
I wince. My ears are ringing. The pain is so great that my vision blanks for a moment. The wind rushes around me, and it takes me a second to realise that I am falling, and another to cast back the spell.
A deafening screech tear through the sky, with a massive shadow looming over me. I snap my gaze upward to see a giant, feathered bird diving straight at me, its beak gaping wide to swallow me whole. I cast a shield spell at the last moment, and it slams against it, sending me hurling through the air. By the time I steady myself, it is upon me once again. I level my staff and unleash a beam of essence strong enough that the creature is flung into the distance.
I must remember. I must… I must remember what it is that I have forgotten.
Another pulse of pain and I am plummeting again. Luckily, the trees are close enough that their branches break my fall, though not without leaving me scratched and bruised. I barely have time to register the wounds before a thunderous roar splits the forest, scattering birds into the sky. The ground trembles, each quake heavier than the last, as something massive draws near. Towering above the treetops, a feathered reptilian beast charges toward me.
I grimace and take to the air, unwilling to stir up further commotion. A couple of kilometres ahead, I spot what I think is a quiet clearing and descend. But the space is not as unoccupied as I thought, a small herd of lean, quick‑footed creatures grazes there. Their bodies are slender, built for speed, with long tails balancing their darting movements. Far smaller than the monstrous predator that just attacked me—they scatter at once, vanishing into the foliage the moment I land.
Or am I searching for demons where there are none? What if the problem was not the others… but me?
I groan as a fresh wave of pain wracks me, and I sink to my knees. I can’t hold my focus—at least not enough to keep my essence in check for predators not to detect.
What am I doing here? I should go back.
“You made the right decision.”
I raise my head, and there is a little boy; short, curly-haired, a freckled face. I have never met him before, but he strangely feels familiar. And what is a child doing here?
Despite the oddness of the situation, a part of me feels relieved by his presence here. “I am very proud of you, Vyswe’eyaga.”
“…w-what—” I moan. Skies… these headaches will be the death of me.
“Come with me.” The boy extends a hand. I stare at it for a long time, my sight blurring a little at the edges, then scramble to get back on my knees.
“Ìnhgū.” I stop in my tracks. I turn around slowly to find Teacher standing a few metres from me. “Thank goodness. We have finally found you.”
Another second and Zaylany lands next to him. He watches me with a mix of worry and caution, like someone trying not to scare a wounded animal away. “Vy, we have been looking for you everywhere. Please, let us bring you back home.”
“How did you find me?” Is all I manage to say.
“Your essence output is all over the place, Ìnhgū. A testament to how poor your mental state is at the moment. Come back home with us.”
I shake my head vehemently, both to ward off the pain and refute his claim. “No… I was too far. You couldn’t have tracked me from such a distance—Y-you, you’re lying!”
“A young woman waddling about and muttering to herself does not go unnoticed, Vy. It was easier to find you than you might think, trust me.”
I shake my head again. No, it doesn’t make sense. None of this does!
“A-ah…”
“Ìnhgū, please. You are not well, let us help you—”
“You did nothing when I told you I was not well weeks ago!”
He balks. “I know… it is my mistake. I did not want you to feel alienated or think that there was something wrong with you. I thought with some rest…” His voice wavers, his face a canvas of guilt. I can feel his sincerity, and it breaks my heart.
“Vy,” Zaylany makes a single step forward. “Let’s go home. We’ll make things right this time, I swear to you. Let’s go home, please.”
“Do not listen to them, Vyswe’eyaga, come with me.”
I look back at the mysterious boy, his hand still stretched out to me. “Who are you—no. What are you?”
“Ìnhgū, who are you speaking to?”
“Y-you don’t see him?” I say, pointing a finger at the boy. “He’s… he’s standing just over there. Can’t you see?”
Their gaze is trained on me, they don’t make a movement, nor utter a word… but I see it in their eyes. The quiet realization in them and the concern.
“H-hah…” N-no, it can’t be. Why can’t they see him—it’s not possible. There is no sort of concealment spell that works selectively on targets. And yet… not a flicker of essence drifts from him. Were it not for the fact that that he was right before me, I would have thought that he was not real.
Or is he? He might be an illusion—no, he’s not. I know he’s real. But why am I so certain that he is real?
“Are you real?” I ask in a shaky voice.
“I am.” The certainty and calm in the boy’s tone reassures me. I don’t know him. I don’t know what he wants from me. And he is younger than I. So, why do I feel more inclined to listen to him rather than the family I have known all my life?
“Ìnhgū, please.”
“I want to go home,” I say after a moment of hesitation. I turn to Teacher and Zaylany, their shoulders fall in relief, but they quickly tense up when I take a step behind. “B-but… this is not reality.”
I spin on my heel and dash toward the boy. Teacher and Zaylany cry out my name, but I have reached him. I extend my hand to take his, and when my fingers are about to graze his…
And he scatters into a puff of smoke.
I stumble and fall on the grassy earth where he had once been. I turn around and Teacher and Zaylany are not there anymore. I am alone in the dark forest. For a brief, dizzying moment, my mind is overwhelmed by the idea that I might have hallucinated all that has just happened.
Then I am screaming at the top of my voice, clutching my head until my fingers nearly tear at my hair. A brutal, vicious, inhuman headache splits my mind apart. I writhe on the ground, grasping at the grass, but the agony does not relent; it pulses through me, each wave sharper than the last. And I pray in that moment to just die right there and then.
I feel a rush within me, and my mind is suddenly flooded with memories I did not know I had—the ones I had forgotten. The empire is no more, with its younger generation induced in an artificial sleep. I was the only one to regain consciousness after thousands of years. The boy. Tchio. The prophet. The Nguo. Kayin, Ike, Ewa—we were all captured. The Nephilim. They all come rushing back, and I push out another scream.
It hurts. It hurts so much.
“Aaah!”
Yet amidst all this, through the unfathomable pain, I hear a familiar voice. Resounding calm and clarity in my head.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk… Why did you have to make it difficult for yourself, hmm, Vy?” A hand seizes my chin and wrenches my head upward. I am met with Sabar’s face, only now she smiles cruelly down at me, and her voice is that of that abhorrent creature. “You should have let yourself enjoy this. It would have spared you—and I—the pain. But you didn’t. Now look at the state you’re in—already teetering on the threshold of madness.”
It grabs me by the hair slams my head to the ground. “You wouldn’t know, I suppose… with your people having made the Art taboo, you must hardly know a thing now, do you? So, allow me to educate you on the topic; you see, the mind is a perfectly oiled cog machine. Each and every one of its pieces—as minute as they be—has a unique, irreplaceable function, they turn and spin in a specific direction, at a specific speed, for a specific number of times, for a specific purpose. Nothing is left to luck. Which is why tampering with the mind is, essentially, forcing the wheels of that machine to grind against their design. It disrupts the system, creates dissonance in the harmony. This makes the process terribly painful; best-case scenario, the mind is scarred, and it may take decades to heal. On the worst-case scenario the mind breaks down, and you either end up cooing like a newborn for the rest of your days or slur to the wind like a retarded. I’m no brute—that is why I prefer to draw my subjects into a dream-like state, they are less resistant and it makes the job for me a lot less gruelling.”
I groan, and I’m not sure if it is because of the headaches or the nails digging into my scalp.
So, all this time, it had been rummaging through my memories. My body trembles in rage and indignation, imagining how that thing had been poking at the most intimate parts of my mind. I feel violated in the worst way possible.
“Oh, please… you are not that special. Get over yourself.”
I am screaming in agony once more. Perhaps because I now understand how the process is done, I can now feel the vile creature burrowing into my mind. My body refuses obey me, I want to thrash around, to hit and claw that thing. Anything to keep it off me. It hurts. The pain is unbearable. Somebody help me!
“You are alone here. This is your mind after all,” it mocks. “The process could have been a painless one for you—now you are going to feel every second of it. You may take comfort in the fact that when you meet your end, your mind will be too ruined for you to feel any of it.”
Tears stream down my face. I have no more voice to scream. There is only the pain now...
Is this really how this is going to end?
“It is not.”
My gaze flickers, and the figure of a young boy appears behind the creature who stole Sabar’s body. It does not seem to have heard him, nor is it aware of his presence. He stands there, calm, staring at me. And resentment coils in my heart. Tchio. He is the one who cast me into this torment, without once aiding me when I needed it. How can he—how dare he—simply stand there like this is none of his business?! The boy makes a face, and I know he heard my thoughts, and I am glad of it. He should at least have the decency to feel guilty about it, if only for a moment.
He shakes his head in an exasperated manner. “Do you remember what I told you, Vyswe’eyaga? When we last met at the church?”
A strange calm overtakes me when he says those words, and the pain fades into background noise. I remember. It was just before I was about to leave. I did not understand why he had told me that at the time, but now it makes perfect sense.
Atop me, I sense the creature wearing my sister’s face flinch, and I repeat out loud the words Tchio had told me.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for He watches over me.”