Chapter 12: The Pattern in the Chain
Time is the slowest acid.
He dissolves empires, erodes mountains, and, with infinite patience, erases the lives of mortals. I saw how he consumed Khafre. I watched him, from the silent watchtower of his shadow, go from being a man at the height of his power to a frail old man, his skin wrinkled like papyrus, his back hunched under the weight of a century of intrigue.
The gilded cage that had been the court of Thebes had become his tomb. He died in his bed, surrounded not by lovers or rivals, but by the ghosts of his ambitions. His last breath was a hoarse whisper, a final question addressed to the darkness that had been his constant companion and secret weapon.
"Will you be free now, Lykaon?"
"Yes," I replied in his mind, my voice echoing in the emptiness of his dying consciousness.
A last, faint smile crossed his lips. "It had to be an interesting cage, at least." And then, the boom-boom, that incessant rhythm that had been the soundtrack of my second life, stopped. His soul fell away, a thread of golden smoke that vanished.
And the chain broke.
This time, there wasn't an explosion of wild joy. There was no desperate race towards a non-existent horizon. I had been waiting for this moment for more than a century. He was prepared.
I emerged from the shadow of the corpse, my colossal form filling the opulent burial chamber. The priests performing the embalming rites screamed, a cacophony of terror that I ignored. My mind, sharpened by decades of study and meditation, focused on a single task.
Count.
One...
The feeling of freedom was a familiar nectar. He could feel the tug of every shadow on the planet, a network of potential paths. I ignored the urge to flee. I focused on the feeling of my own essence, free from the bondage of Khafre's soul, analyzing every nuance.
Two... Three...
The shouts of the priests became a background noise. I was in a state of heightened perception. Time seemed to slow down. I could feel the Celestial System, my jailer's mechanism, beginning to move. It was like hearing the first and distant gear of a cosmic machine starting.
Four... Five... Six...
The machinery was accelerating. The cosmic harpoon was being targeted. He could sense the impending recapture, not as an attack, but as a fundamental law of nature about to reassert itself. But there was a delay. A lapse.
Seven.
The instant the seventh second came to an end, reality was torn apart. I was torn from the world, sucked back into the torrent of golden light. But this time, I took something with me: knowledge. There was a pattern. A margin of seven seconds. A weakness.
My fall was instantaneous. I crashed into a new soul. Not in the warmth of a belly, but in the already formed body of a little boy lying sick with fever in a log cabin somewhere on a cold, wooded continent he didn't recognize. The impact was jarring.
My new prison was a warrior. A Celtic boy, born into a tribe that worshipped the gods of the forest and war. His name was Faelan.
The change was brutal. Khafre's life had been one of intellect and magic. Faelan's life was one of steel and blood. During the day, he was a passenger in a corps learning to wield a sword, shoot a bow, hunt in dark forests, and fight in tribal skirmishes.
My mindset changed completely. He was no longer a resigned prisoner. He was a conspirator. The seven-second revelation had given me a goal. A plan began to form in the depths of my consciousness, a long-term plan that required patience, experimentation, and a deep understanding of my own nature.
The nights were no longer for wandering or hunting by instinct. They became my secret laboratory.
Phaelan's leash, like Lycos', had a limited reach, an invisible circle around his tribe's camp. Within this circle, I began my experiments. He was no longer trying to break the chain. Now, my goal was to understand her, and myself.
First, I focused on my own form. I was no longer trying to regain my humanity; That was a losing battle, a useless nostalgia. Instead, I explored the limits of my beastly form. I learned to manipulate the darkness that composed me. I learned to make my fur as hard as obsidian or as intangible as smoke. I learned to extend my claws, not as physical appendages, but as projections of my will, capable of cutting not only flesh, but also wind.
My biggest breakthrough came when I went back to look for that other place. That plane of blackness that I had briefly brushed against during my previous imprisonment. I used Faelan's soul as an anchor, not to flee, but to force an opening. Night after night, I would sit in the darkness of the woods and push my consciousness against the boundaries of reality.
At first, I only got sparkles. A moment of absolute silence, a vision of a starless void. But I kept insisting. It was like opening an old wound in the fabric of the universe.
And one night, I succeeded.
It was not a physical transition. My shadow body remained in the forest, but a part of my consciousness slipped through a crack I had opened. I entered the Dimension of Darkness.
The feeling was like coming home to a home I never knew I had.
It was a place of perfect silence and solitude, but it was not the emptiness of death. It had substance. It was an endless ocean of blackness, and I could swim in it. I felt my own power magnified here, my essence resonating with the nature of the plane.
My leash ripped me off after seven seconds, but it had been enough. He had found the key.
The Dimension of Darkness wasn't just a place. It was a concept. A concept of pure blackness, conceptually identical to me. If the System needed an anchor, could an anchor be a place rather than a soul? Could I anchor myself to a concept?
The idea was blasphemy, a heresy against the laws of my creation. It was perfect.
Now, the plan had two parts. I needed a new anchor. And I needed a decoy. If I was going to transfer my anchor, the System would need something to hold on to instead. I'd need an echo, a ghost of myself to leave it on the chain.
I began the second phase of my experimentation. The forging of the echo.
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