"… So what now? Since you are so eager to get things done", Danil swallows a curse before continuing, choosing his words carefully "I still don't follow, how would you make this easier"
Mara without any warning phases into Danil. The sensation is difficult to express both chilling across his body and an intense heat bubbling from somewhere in his chest. No the heat can be felt in his chest yes, but he realizes he is not feeling it physically.
Suddenly intense pain radiates across Danil's body, falling down to the ground. "Gha..agh", barely choking out a groan, unable to even scream from the pain.
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Pitch black… Nothing… no sensation in the traditional sense. The being is vaguely aware of it's own form, one body, four limbs and one head. A tumorous vein spreads across it's body. The being understands that this infection is not part of itself yet is powerless to stop it.
Slowly being corrupted. It's neck twists grotesquely from it's torso, bending in ways more chaotically then a messed up knot. A cavity forms amid it's chest. Gaping wide open to the size of a bowling ball.
The being does not understand what these changes entail, nor can it ponder over it with any depth. Time has no meaning here, whether these changes occurred in an instant or across an infinity, it cannot be discerned. Simply drift along this void is all that can be done.
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Danil woke up on the floor of his apartment. He did not remember returning to it.
The ceiling occupied his field of vision for a moment. He conducted a methodical inventory: fingers first, then hands, wrists, arms. Everything responded. He noted a deep structural ache that had nothing to do with bruising and everything to do with something fundamental having been rearranged. He sat up.
Mara was in the corner.
Not hovering. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the way a person would. It was somehow more unsettling than the floating.
"How long," Danil said. His voice came out rough at the edges.
"Six hours."
He processed that. Outside, the window showed the flat grey of early morning.
"You could have warned me."
"I said I'd show you, didn't I?"
He opened his mouth, reconsidered, and pressed his palm flat to the floorboard instead. The texture was identical. Something underneath it was not, a faint current, the way you can feel the vibration of a train through the ground before you hear it. He pulled his hand back and looked at it.
"What did you do to me."
"Reformed your first layer to match mine." She tilted her head at the angle that would have snapped a living person's spine. "Better if you experience the rest yourself. Start simple. Imagine yourself floating."
Danil's skepticism was readable at distance, but he complied. He visualized lifting from the ground. Nothing. He focused harder, constructing the image with more precision. The sensation of weight leaving his feet, his center of gravity rising. Still nothing. He gave Mara a pointed look.
Mara appeared to be engaged in her own private thoughts. After a moment she said, "Try imagining hanging from your neck."
Danil paused, hesitating initially before complying.
The instant the image formed, something yanked upward from inside his collar. He choked. His feet left the floor.
He would not have described his situation as floating. Hanging was the accurate term. He flailed, which only made things worse, and then the sensation released and he dropped and hit the floor again and spent several seconds getting his breathing back in order.
"See," Mara said. "You can fly now."
"That —" He stopped. Started again. "Couldn't you have designed this around something other than hanging?"
Ignoring the last question Mara says,"This should make things considerably easier for you."
"This alone won't get us a solid approach on Lurek."
"Get up. There's more."
He got up.
His legs held on the way to the bathroom. He ran cold water over his face, gripped the sink edge, looked at his reflection. Same face. He had been prepared, on some level, for something different — discolouration, a mark under the skin, visible evidence of the transaction. There was nothing. He looked ordinary. He found that mildly offensive.
He looked at his reflection for another moment and then looked past it, at the bathroom behind him. Empty.
He registered the emptiness not through his eyes but through something adjacent to them — a sense that operated in the same register as peripheral vision but wasn't that. He could feel whether a space was occupied without looking directly at it. A room with someone in it felt different from a room without, the same way a sentence with a word missing feels different even before you identify which word is gone.
He filed that away and went back out.
"Is that what you planted," he said. "That perception."
Something shifted in Mara's posture without her expression changing. "Among other things. You won't understand all of it at once."
"Try me."
She studied him with the same evaluating look she'd used when she held him upside down in the corridor.
"The imprint in your chest is a tether," she said. "It keeps me anchored and keeps you functional. All people have souls, and divided into 3 layers. I changed your first layer in my image" She paused. "This should allow you to use some of my prowess"
Danil has more questions then answers but inquires about a specific one,"If you can do this why do you even need me"
"I can't interact with everyone… like I can't interact with their weight"
"Their weight?"
"I don't know everything okay. If I could have I already would have taken my revenge by myself"
Danil accepts that answer for now.
He looked at his hand again. He reached for the warmth in his chest to better understand what Mara meant, searching for it deliberately this time. It was faint, like trying to identify a sound from two rooms over through a closed door. He let it go.
"That's it?"
Mara's expression flattened by one degree. "You've had it for six hours."
He conceded the point.
He crossed to the coat hook near the door and pulled on his jacket. His hand moved to the inner pocket without thinking about it, checking for the crude pipe-fitting gun Nathan had handed him. Still there. One shot. He left it where it was.
He turned back to the room.
"Lurek," he said.
Mara unfolded from the floor. The cross-legged posture dropped away and she was simply vertical, the transition too smooth to track, gravity apparently operating on her as a suggestion rather than a rule.
"Lurek," she confirmed.
Danil rolled his shoulder, feeling the last of the structural ache settle into something manageable. The warmth in his chest had changed overnight. Less acute than it had been — less like a coal pressed against the inside of his sternum. It had taken on a rhythm, steady and faintly offset from his own heartbeat, as if something in his chest had learned to breathe on a different schedule.
He did not like it. He opened the door anyway.