"Where am I now?"
Aster opened his eyes slowly, his head pounding with a dull, persistent ache.
He was inside a building—the inside of the mansion, he realized after a moment. But it looked completely different from what he'd glimpsed from outside. Darker. More oppressive. The walls were covered in strange stains that might have been blood or mold or something worse. The floorboards were rotted and broken in places.
A window in front of him was open, and cold air poured through it, making the tattered curtains flutter. He could smell decay and something else—something sweet and sickly that made his stomach turn.
He tried to move, to stand up, but his body wouldn't respond. His limbs felt like they were made of lead. No matter how hard he concentrated, how much he willed his arms to move or his legs to shift, nothing happened.
Paralyzed.
"What's happening?" he whispered, panic rising in his chest.
To his left, he could see candles—dozens of them arranged in a circle. But these weren't normal candles. The flames burned crimson, an unnatural red that cast everything in a bloody light. And in the center of that circle, placed with obvious ritual significance, was a skull.
The same otherworldly skull from Silas's description. The one that looked almost like a goat but was wrong in every detail—the horns spiraling in impossible directions, the eye sockets far too large, the teeth too numerous and sharp.
Aster's panic intensified. "I only remember looking at the Eye of Evil," he said to himself, trying to piece together what had happened. "Everything after that is foggy and confused. How did I get here?"
He tried again to move his arms, focusing all his willpower on just lifting one hand. His fingers twitched slightly but nothing more. Whatever had paralyzed him was powerful.
Then his eyes caught something in his left pocket—a shape, a weight he hadn't noticed before. With great effort, he managed to angle his head just enough to see what it was.
A gun.
An actual gun—a rare and expensive weapon in a world where magic was far more common than firearms.
"A gun?" Aster said in confusion. "What is a gun doing with me? I don't own a gun."
Had someone placed it there? Was it meant for him to use? But use against what?
The crimson circle of candles suddenly flared brighter, the flames growing taller and more intense. The light they cast became almost painful to look at directly.
Aster stared at it, trying to understand. "What does this mean? Do I have to put out the candles?"
He reached for the gun again, straining with everything he had. His hand moved slightly—just a few inches—but the effort exhausted him. He was completely paralyzed, unable to do anything no matter how desperately he tried.
He looked around more carefully, taking in more details of his prison. Broken glass bottles lay scattered across the floor around him. His feet—he could feel it now—were hurting, probably cut by shards he'd stepped on while under whatever influence had brought him here.
The crimson circle grew brighter still, and Aster could swear he heard whispers starting to emanate from it. Voices speaking in languages he didn't understand, chanting in rhythm with the flickering flames.
"The spell," Aster suddenly remembered. "I can use the purification spell."
He closed his eyes, blocking out the nightmarish scene around him, and focused all his concentration on the words Silas had shown him. The words that had saved him once before.
"Purify the evil around me," he spoke clearly, putting all his will behind the command.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, with a sound like a hurricane wind, power exploded outward from Aster's body.
The window burst fully open, the glass that remained shattering outward. And in that sudden rush of wind and light, Aster saw them.
Spirits. Dozens—no, *hundreds*—of them. Shadowy figures that had been invisible before, all crowded around him, their hands reaching out, touching him, holding him in place. They were what had paralyzed him.
And now they were burning.
The spirits shrieked—high-pitched wails of pain and rage—as white light consumed them. One by one they burst into flames, their shadowy forms dissolving into ash that was carried away by the wind.
Within seconds, the room was clear. Aster felt sensation returning to his limbs. He could move again.
He stumbled forward, nearly falling, catching himself against a nearby table. His legs were weak and his feet did hurt—cuts from the broken glass—but he was free.
"I can't believe that worked," he breathed.
But he wasn't safe yet. He could still feel the oppressive atmosphere of the mansion pressing down on him. The crimson candles continued to burn, and that skull continued to sit in its circle, radiating malevolence.
He moved closer to it cautiously, keeping his newly acquired staff raised defensively.
"Is this what Silas mentioned earlier?" he whispered. "The skull from the ritual? But where is he? Where's Silas?"
His chest tightened with worry. Had Silas been caught by the Eye as well? Was he somewhere else in this nightmare mansion, paralyzed like Aster had been?
Aster looked around more carefully, taking in the full layout of the room. He was in what had once been a grand entrance hall. A central staircase curved upward to the second floor, though many of the steps were broken or missing. Portraits hung on the walls, their subjects' faces obscured by grime and water damage.
And then—
*Crash!*
A vase fell from somewhere above, tumbling down the stairs and shattering on the landing.
Aster's heart jumped. He moved closer, looking at the broken pieces.
It was the same vase. The exact same hand-painted vase he'd repaired for that woman in dark clothing this morning.
He knelt down and picked up one of the larger shards. There was something written on the inside of the pottery, revealed only now that it was broken. Crude letters scratched into the clay before it had been fired:
*WORSHIP THE EYES OF EVIL*
"Was that lady part of the evil cult?" Aster said aloud, the pieces clicking together in his mind. "She must have been. She dropped the vase on purpose to mark me somehow. And the message says 'eyes'—plural. That means there really are two or more of them."
He stood up and looked toward where the vase had fallen from. Behind the table on the second-floor landing, he could see something that seemed out of place—a large mirror in an ornate frame, still intact and gleaming despite the decay surrounding it.
Curiosity pulled at him. Aster climbed the damaged stairs carefully, testing each step before putting his full weight on it.
When he reached the landing, he approached the mirror and looked at his reflection.
His breath caught.
Dark marks encircled his eyes—not bruises, but something else. Patterns that looked almost like writing in a language he didn't know, etched into his skin in shadowy lines. The marks of the Eye's touch.
"Wait," he said slowly, understanding dawning. "This is a dream. This has to be a dream."
He looked around at the mansion, at the impossible architecture, at the way shadows moved independently of any light source.
"Yes," he continued, speaking to himself. "It must be. I'm still unconscious from looking at the Eye. This is all in my head."
Which meant...
"If this is a dream, then that means at the party that night—before I had the nightmare—I must have looked at the Eye of Evil then too. But I don't remember. The Eye erased that memory."
And if this was a dream, then he had some control over it. Dream logic. He could manipulate things if he focused.
Aster turned away from the mirror and looked down at the crimson circle on the ground floor below. The candles were still burning, and he could sense something building in that ritual space. Whatever the cultists had been trying to summon, the spell was still active, still working toward completion.
"I can stop it," Aster said. "Or... or I can see what they were trying to create."
He raised both hands toward the crimson circle, channeling his magic through gesture and will. In the real world, this would take careful spell preparation and specific incantations. But in a dream, belief was enough.
"Whatever you're trying to create," Aster commanded, his voice ringing with authority, "come into existence. Show yourself!"
The candles flared so bright they became like miniature suns. The crimson light filled the entire mansion, spilling out through the broken windows. The skull in the center of the circle began to vibrate, then to rise into the air.
The mansion shook. The roof above began to crack and splinter, large chunks of it falling away. The ground beneath buckled and heaved.
And from the ritual circle, it came.
A massive beast pulled itself into existence, its form coalescing from the crimson light and dark magic. It was enormous—easily three stories tall—with the general shape of a bird but wrong in every detail. Its body was covered not in feathers but in scales that shifted between colors that shouldn't exist. Its eyes were the same absolute darkness as the Eye of Evil, set deep in a skull-like head. Its beak was sharp as a sword and seemed to be made of bone. Wings that looked like they belonged on a dragon rather than a bird spread wide, blocking out what little light remained.
It was like a phoenix, but corrupted. Twisted. Made evil.
The creature threw back its head and *screamed*—a sound that was part bird cry, part human scream, part something else entirely that made Aster's bones ache.
Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it dissolved back into light. The vision complete. The crimson circle returned to normal, the candles burning with their steady unnatural flame once more.
Aster stood on the landing, breathing hard, his heart racing.
"I need to get out of this dream," he said urgently. "I need to wake up and tell Silas what I saw."
But first... first he could explore a little more. If this was a dream constructed from his subconscious and the Eye's influence, there might be more information hidden here. More truths that his waking mind couldn't access.
He saw a window at the far end of the landing—still intact, overlooking what should be the front of the mansion.
"I can find out more while I'm still asleep," he reasoned, moving toward it.
He reached the window and looked out.
And his heart stopped.
His legs went weak, and he had to grab the windowsill to keep from falling.
"Yes," he whispered, his voice barely audible. "There are..."
The rest of the words died in his throat. Speech became impossible.
Outside, the sky was no longer sky.
Every inch of it—horizon to horizon, from the ground to the highest clouds—was covered with eyes.
Hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. All different sizes, different colors, different shapes. Some were massive like the one that had caught him, easily the size of buildings. Others were smaller, no bigger than his fist. They hung in the air like grotesque stars, all watching, all *seeing*.
Ancient eyes. Evil eyes. Eyes that had existed since before the world was young, waiting in the darkness beyond reality for someone to open the door and let them in.
And now that door was open.
All of those eyes—every single one of them—slowly rotated to focus on the window where Aster stood.
They were all looking at *him*.
--