Hunger gripped at his guts. His fangs, retracted and hidden, tingled beneath his face. This world was beyond strange. How could such a place be paradise? From afar, those buildings were grand and magnificient. Up close, as he stood in the shadow of one he recognized from the skyline, he saw the truth of it. The design was beautiful, but it was covered in imperfections. Where metal was meant to bend, visible ligaments and connections made themselves raw upon the latticework of engineering. He walked through the streets, between all manner of businesses, residentials, and leisures. He saw the beggars in between, the downtrodden, those who worked like dogs loading crates from grand containers that hovered in the air into the backs of shops, the criminal element that oozed through the pores of the city, and the disparity between those who had, barely visible in their upper layers of ascended stories, and those who had not.

  It was very similar to Crimsire. How could paradise possibly have similar, if not worse, differences between the wealthy and poor than a place ruled by an absolute monarchy? An Empire? Xala watched a floating carriage whizz on by, adorned in all sorts of glitter and gems, while a dusty man manually pulled an ox-cart the other direction.

  Clearly, this place was not paradise.

  But, if it was not paradise, an afterlife, then where was he? Another world? Another planet? Another realm? Was he spliced out of one dimension into another?

  Or was his time in that box longer than he imagined? It had felt like an eternity, but he understood temporal prisons! They could exact a thousand year sentence within the victim’s mind in only a few hours. Had his jailors been so cruel that they imprisoned him without the stasis effect? Who even were his jailors?

  Thus, a wretched option existed before him. Once it was known, it was plain as day. He was not in another world. He was still on Merces. In however much time he was locked away, the world had advanced far beyond his wildest expectations. Although, if that was the case, where on Merces was he?

  Wherever he was, he wanted to feed. The dryness in his throat was satiated by a pleasant man handing out bottled water free of charge. But, his entire body itched for something more. As he maneuvered through the streets, he had to lean against a wall and take deep, soothing breaths to keep his mind in check, lest he become frenzied and feast on the closest target. The last time he felt so thirsty for blood and souls was his time with the Master, before that elf found out how to feed him.

  Despite the new land, the new city, the new world he existed in, he understood populations of mortals. He knew that crime existed, that much was obvious anywhere someone took a good look at the city. Thugs beat up debtors in back alleys, squatters found refuge in abandoned apartments and nooks, and people covered in ritualistic tattoos graced his presence constantly. Whether some of these things were legal or not, trend or threat, he did not care. He was after more worthy prey.

  Thus, Xala stood still, tilted his head up, and inhaled through his nostrils. His inner gland opened and he took in the odors of the city. A marketplace Southward, full of openly roasted meats and heavily spiced sauces. A landfill or some sort of waste facility up North. The ocean back East. Finally, trace amounts of blood and sweat West. He honed his senses on that western fragrance and followed it.

  He went deeper into the belly of the beast, beneath a canopy of bridges, walkways, rooftop plazas, and signs. He meandered through a street full of businesses and colorful lights. The smell of pleasure houses tempted his nose, but his focus was absolute. When the blood’s scent was strongest he stopped. Before him was a butcher shop stuck between a seafood eatery and a brothel. The set of neighbors made Xala’s face scrunch at their unlikely adjacency, but he dismissed his thoughts and walked inside.

  As much as he wanted to feast on an intelligent creature, if he could find a pig before it was slaughtered that would suffice. Xala employed his invisibility and snuck into the shadows. People inside browsed and chatted as the butcher at the counter rang up an order. Slabs of meat, neatly packaged, were on the counter being sold to a great big bovine man. Xala looked at the odd sight of the bovine humanoid purchasing beef and minded his business as he moved toward the back room.

  He followed his nose toward the butcher blocks, where drying blood lingered in the cold room and the skinned carcasses of animals hung from hooks. The cleanliness of the operation baffled Xala, who was just as baffled by the concept of how cold the room was. He did not sense cryomantic enchantments around the room. Some other mechanism was at work.

  Whatever the case, he still did not find the source of his desired blood. He sniffed the air again. Fresh, intelligent blood. Humanoid, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was a new but similar flavor. For a Moor, blood can hint at the soul of a creature. And that soul was just right.

  Xala crept up the staircase to the second floor. At the top, a door to the living quarters stood in the way of his meal. Beyond, he heard whispers and the flicker of soft flames. Blood flooded Xala’s nostrils when he took another whiff, alongside iron, chalk, and wax.

  He raised his hand toward the door. A lavender light blossomed to life from his fingers, formed ten rings of energy that became calligraphic symbols, and flicked them toward the door. The lavender energies splashed against the door, slithered into the metal, skittered toward the pad of numbers over a box, rapidly punched in those numbers, and the door unlocked. Xala gently pried it open to peek inside.

  A naked man sat on his knees before a woman’s body. The Oba human man, a sickly, pale, mousy fellow, chanted in hushed whispers over the elf’s corpse. His hands bled from cuts in his palms. Xala did not know her kin. Her antlers and bits of bark-like flesh made her an enigma to him. Her body was covered in slices arranged in patterns and latticework symbols. Her body was prepared to be a vessel, any hint of her former soul utterly removed and long since passed. The man beckoned something to fill the void.

  “Lord of Ten-Thousand Eyes, send unto me a visitor. Bring unto me a harbinger who I may treat with. I offer this vessel unto thee, so that our pact may be drawn in blood. May the visitor strike my flesh, drink of my life, and grant me what I seek. I offer my blood unto thee, so that I may know more of the Seventh! I offer my life unto thee, my eternal servitude, so that I may know what you know. So that I may see what you see.” He then repeated the chant in a tongue Xala understood — Kthonic, the Tongue of the Watcher. The tongue Lord Morl used to speak in order to summon his own envoys from the Parallels.

  The man repeated himself many times, the candle flames undulated and beat like a heart, the candles arranged about a chalk uniform hexagram. Each triangle’s intersection had a candle, and in the space between were iron medallions forged into different runes. The rite was meant to conjure a powerful entity. His chants echoed around the bare room whose only amenities were dust clumps and a worn mattress with no covers. Cabinets were built into the walls and blended together into a flat, blank canvas.

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  Finally, after the seventh chant in his foreign tongue and the seventh chant in Kthonic, the candles’ flames grew. They illuminated the entire room as they flared with energy and a black wind bloomed from the melted wax, fluttered through the air, and slithered into the open wounds of the woman on the floor. Her eyes opened, bloodshot and dilated. Her lips parted, a grotesque death rattle escaping to usher a drowned, metallic, deep voice.

  “You dare bring that before me?”

  “Ah! Oh, thank you for answering, Visitor!”

  “You dare bring that before me?”

  “I-I, what?”

  The woman’s hand rose, flesh sagged around the mutilations, and pointed at Xala, invisible in the shadowy corner. “You have brought an interloper before me. You dare incur my wrath?”

  “I cannot see,” he looked at the corner with frantic eyes, looked toward the visitor, back to the empty corner, and said, “Whoever you are, reveal yourself! You will not ruin my rite!”

  Xala, in his Moorish flesh, dismissed his invisibility.

  Color drained from the man’s face, his eyes widened, his lips parted, his wrinkly features sagged, and he emitted a horrified, primal whine. He extended his finger, pointed at Xala, and tried to scream. Curdled, breathy wheezes clamored from his throat.

  “Leave us, interloper. He is mine.”

  I’m hungry. Xala spoke in Kthonic through the energies in the air, a lesson taught to him by Lord Morl. His lips remained closed and his eyes were fixed on the vessel. Apologies for wasting your trip.

  “You mean to eat him?”

  He seems delicious. Full of occult knowledge, I bet. I wonder if he could teach me anything new.

  The man, scrambled and against the nearby wall, held his finger out and whimpered as he tried to cast a spell. The inscriptions around his body lit up with energy, runes bloomed to life around his fingers, and he prepared an arcane missile. Xala assessed it, analyzed it, and with a wave of his hand, a flare and flutter of his own inscriptions and runes, created a bubble around the man’s hand.

  When the man’s battle magic was cast, a white-blue rocket of energy ricocheted around the bubble, blasted sizzling holes through his hand, shredded the appendage to pieces, and finally ran out of fuel when the hand was completely gone. Only ligaments and bone fragments dangled from the screaming man’s wrist.

  Another spell flew from Xala’s hand. The man’s lips no longer produced noise as a bundle of twisting glyphs formed in his mouth, created a black ball of smog, and leaked outward to fill his mouth. The gag halted all vibrations, rendered the man silent, and Xala watched as the man’s tears flowed.

  Shall I dismiss you with a gift? Truly, I regret stealing your well-earned deal.

  “You know what I desire. A servant.”

  I can offer you a soul?

  “Three.”

  Three souls? My, you must be greedy.

  “It settles the debt you aim to create.”

  Well, perhaps, you would remember this face? Xala’s flesh shifted into the soft, gentle-eyed, lavender inscripted Dawn Kin elf.

  The woman’s face became rigid. Her anger was gone. Only neutral recognition remained.

  “Dajilominim. You shall incur no debt to us with this kill. Bid me passage from this world, and I shall not speak of your whereabouts.”

  I appreciate that. Xala walked toward the vessel, held his hand out over it, and said, You are considerate, even if for the wrong reason.

  “Hidden or stolen from our sight, remain that way.”

  Xala nodded, turned his hand upward, drew the dark energy from the woman’s corpse, balled his fist, created a series of glyphs in the air around the ambiguous darkness, connected them by tendrils of lavender, opened a rift beneath the darkness, and guided it back from whence it came. The rift of writhing red and lavender energy welcomed the shadows beyond its opaque veil. Xala closed it with a final whisper and the release of his fist.

  The man writhed in place on the floor, twitched wildly, and whimpered in a desperate plea for aid. Even as his throat clicked with the desperate attempt to articulate, no speech came, only the tightness of his chest and the blood that gushed from his wrist remained. His eyes shifted upward, their wells broken by a deluge of tears, and watched Xala’s Moor form with a silent, desperate hope for mercy.

  Xala knelt down, looked him in the eye, and reached outward. His long, black claws came close to the ritualist’s face, plucked a tear off his cheek, cut it in the process, and brought it close to him. He studied the droplet of salty water, glanced back at the man, and smiled.

  Silence permeated the space. A wretched soundlessness born from insulated walls and the death of those candles. Xala could hear the man’s heartbeat, the sweat ooze from his pores, and the piss in his pants. He chuckled, grabbed the man’s hair, tugged his head to the side, and lunged forward. His two upper fangs flew out from his gums, pierced the man’s flesh with ease, and began to drink.

  Xala’s forked, barbed tongue lashed out, tore the skin open further, and lapped up the blood. His jaw clamped down around the man’s jugular, two more fangs from below sank into that artery, and drained the blood. Xala held the man down as he scrambled weakly. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, his mouth agape, and body gradually less responsive.

  After a few minutes, the man’s body went limp, as the last bits of blood filtered into the special organ inside of Xala that converted the blood into raw energy and fuel. When the last droplets of blood flowed, the man’s soul followed. An invisible, intangible essence compelled to follow by the last of his vitality. The tangle of consciousness, energy, and lifeforce was sucked into Xala’s fangs, across his nervous system, and joined the deep, dark well of long vanquished enemies and victims.

  Frederick Yumis’s life flashed before Xala’s eyes. Imagery of poverty, discrimination, and sorrow flickered across his mind. Desperation wound itself around every memory — family, money, magic, power, whatever he did not have enough of he needed with every ounce of his being. Xala would have to meditate on this one’s soul to understand more, but finally, he understood the newfound Trymoran language.

  His corpse collapsed onto itself as Xala rose, licked the inside of his mouth to get the last bits of blood down his gullet, and retracted his fangs. His mind felt a wash of relief. He forgot how painful his headache was. He had lived with it for so long. His knees buckled under the loss of such mental weights. Every second, he felt lighter and freer.

  Finally, he supposed, he felt like himself again. Xala flexed his hands, chuckled to himself, and changed his flesh back to the elf’s. He rolled his shoulders back, cracked his neck side to side, and attempted his first new words, “Feh, Fehl, Felt, Felt-kuh-han.” He turned toward the thick sound-proof windows of the loft. “Feltkan.” The name of faux-paradise. “Truh-i-muh-oh,” he nipped his tongue, shifted it around in his mouth, and retried, “Trymora.” The continent he found himself on was a strange place.