I woke up on the floor. Something soft cushioned my head. Before I collected myself, a scathing pain shot down my forearm. I pulled back the gauntlet far enough to see the source—a forking cascade of Lichtenberg figures on the underside of my wrist to my palm contoured by light distended flesh, red around the edges.

Great. Fucker had marked me.

A gloved hand reached out, tracing the pattern. Seer cleared her throat, and when it didn’t seem to work, cleared it again. “You spoke to him.”

Hastur hadn’t transported me anywhere. Our meeting took place entirely in my head. And judging from the lack of soreness and bruises, Seer must have caught me when I lost consciousness. I scrambled to my feet and took a half-step back, reaching a hand toward my face. The mask was still equipped. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. She could have easily looked and replaced it during the lapse.

“What the fuck is this?” I asked, pointing to the mark.

“Proof of your allegiance. Evidence of your potential.”

“Skip the fucking riddles,” I said. With the way my summons all chimed in at once, urging calm, I must have shouted.

Seer leaned back, more surprised than fearful at the sudden outburst. “If it is the mark itself that bothers you, it is invisible to those outside the Order. It speaks to a significance beyond the rank and file. Few are graced by Hastur directly. Those who are, receive a mark. The length of the mark and number of branches directly correlate with the supplicant’s potential impact. If—”

“That’s enough.”

“You don’t want to know—”

“We’re done here,” I cut in.

Seer bowed her head. “Your reaction is unfortunate but not at all uncommon. Coming face to face with a deity can be an alarming and humbling experience. Seek me out when the turmoil has faded. Return the way you came. The elevator will be open to you.”

Turmoil was a good word for it. I was spiraling. A profound feeling of uprootedness permeated deep in my mind, threatening to propagate and spread. I needed to reset, recenter, before I did or said something I couldn’t explain.

I walked away, fists clenching and unclenching almost entirely on their own. System text scrolled in front of my face as I hurried to the elevator.

<Pivotal Quest Received>

Quest: Fractured Fate

Quest Description: The Retainer in Violet has chosen you as an agent to use the Transposition toward the creation of a utopia. This quest has no visible objectives. Your actions from this point onward will be evaluated on a sliding scale. As you actively contribute to or undermine the Retainer’s intent, your standing will adjust appropriately.

System Warning: Pivotal Quests can be hugely rewarding, but are often catalysts for drastic change. Their volatile nature and tendency to affect the world around them can cause other, more mundane quests to become incompletable or lost. The completion of a Pivotal Quest frequently results in serious consequences for the individual as well, such as gaining or transference of patronage and access to exclusive gear, spells, and knowledge.

Quest Difficulty: ???

Time Limit: ???

Quest Reward: That which you desire most.

I swiped it away. This time, the elevator doors slid open on their own and allowed me entry. Once they closed, I retreated within my mind, trying to manage the panic.

Hastur was full of shit. Anyone with power who promised to make things better on the scale he was talking about almost always was. Selflessness, more often than not, is little more than pageantry. Altruism is rarely more than a bedazzled method of stroking your own ego.

Hastur didn’t give two fucks about anyone. His endgame, like so many others, was about control. But if—and only if—he was capable of even a fraction of what he claimed, his interpretation of control was…

Tantalizing.

Before the dome, the average person was lucky to make it through life with no major disasters. The lucky ones found a job they didn’t hate, a house they could afford. A family that loved them.

Even if you were one of those lucky few, you were still only one bad day away from disaster. Sometimes you didn’t even have to make a choice. Sickness, abandonment, and financial ruin were always waiting on the horizon, the three horsemen of the post-modern apocalypse. And if you had any self-awareness, that inevitable realization weighed heavily.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if chaos, random chance, and all the other bullshit beyond our control no longer factored? What if someone could just tell you what you needed to do to succeed and be happy?

They can’t.

It would be easier to work through this if I was looking at it rationally, but Hastur had nailed me to the fucking wall. When he described my perfect future, I’d felt an honest-to-god stir. A tug of desire I couldn’t rationally explain.

His predictions had been so ordinary. The system still existed in the future he’d outlined for me, yet he hadn’t even mentioned it.

In Hastur’s perfect future, I’d effectively retired from User life, and it was obvious why.

I held my gauntlets palm up and stared at them. They were battle-scarred and torn. Beneath the gauntlet, my arms held scars of their own, connected to a patchwork of close calls inscribed across the rest of my body that grew more numerous almost by the day. There was a twinge in my ribs that ached from sudden changes in temperature. And almost every time I sat down, it was harder to get up again.

I couldn’t do this forever.

Too many times already, I’d survived by the skin of my teeth, often on a technicality I hadn’t even been aware of. As rational as I tried to be, there was just too much I didn’t know. Countless potential threats I couldn’t realistically prepare for. I’d thrown myself into it, regardless. Fought like hell. Because the struggle was all I knew. And I thought I’d accepted how it all inevitably ended. That I could be at peace with dying, so long as my family was taken care of.

Hastur had committed the greatest cruelty of all. He’d given me the possibility of hope. Like a bright halo of sun filtering through a curtain.

Almost as bad, he’d given me a taste of what I’d been missing my entire life. How it felt like to be normal. The memories he’d picked all had a powerful emotion attached to them. Empathy, joy, grief. That they weren’t all positive and elating only lent more credence to the demonstration. He’d let me sample it all. Even now, the agitation and confusion of emotion felt as if it was being filtered through a pinhole. I had nothing to compare it to before. And now I knew, in painstaking detail, exactly what I was missing.

Throughout my life, I viewed my coldness and lack of empathy as a shield. It protected me from the worst of the storms. The fallout. I’d known on some level that it wasn’t free. That the steel blinders that protected me from the lows also robbed me of the highs. But I’d never felt the starkness of the difference until now.

If Hastur had offered to “fix” me and remove the blinders permanently on the spot, I would have passed. As he himself had said, I wasn’t sure I’d be capable of doing what I needed to do as a normal person. The fear alone would pose a nigh-insurmountable wall, and there was too high a likelihood of freezing in a key moment.

But after? If the world he’d described was at all possible?

Could I really put the knife down?

Live a normal existence, free of the shadows that plagued me, unburdened by constant conflict?

Too good to be true.

I latched onto the thought like an anchor. Slowly, the false hope drowned beneath a wave of distrust. The gods had given me little reason to trust them farther than I could throw them. Hastur was no exception. His people had been out of pocket from the beginning—and so far as I knew, he’d done little to correct their supposed missteps beyond wagging his finger from a distance and giving me an artifact-level potion like it was a hallmark bereavement card.

He didn’t care what they’d done, so long as they were effective. The only reason he was taking action now was to unify the order. Which implied a darker agenda. One that required the sort of people he’d recruited to carry it out. People like Aaron.

It was impossible to strangle the hope completely. Hastur was too compelling for that. I settled for suppressing it, forcing it down into something more manageable.

Maybe Hastur could do everything he promised and more. That didn’t matter. Distant theoreticals were irrelevant. Power always came at a price. What mattered was discovering what the Order was willing to pay. And how much, exactly, it would cost the rest of us.

“Azure.”

The lithid manifested in my mind’s eye, his head hung. “Is it time?”

It took me a moment to realize what he meant. What he must have been waiting for, ever since he underwent the geas. “You think I’m going to release you.”

Azure rubbed his arms. “It’s the correct decision. My usefulness is limited. I’m bound by the geas now.”

He’d answered the lingering question I’d summoned him for, though not with the answer I’d wanted. Once I realized what was happening, I’d hoped the geas wouldn’t affect him at all because of his nature. That wasn’t the case, and this was going to be a lot harder with Azure’s hands tied behind his back, but I’d never even considered dismissing him. Probably because he’d just taken the magical equivalent of a bullet for me.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said firmly. Azure looked up at me in surprise.

“But…”

“Just, take a back seat for a while. Need to be careful until we know how strict the limitations are.” My thoughts went to Nick. He’d given me quite a bit of information, enough that it surprised me he’d gotten away with it without breaching the geas. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that he probably had. But as far as I knew, it hadn’t triggered. It was possible it had something to do with intent. Nick probably hadn’t realized how much he was giving away, which, in theory, was why the geas hadn’t flagged him. If there was a weakness there, I needed to exploit it.

It was just a matter of figuring out how. Azure looked like he was fighting the urge to hug me. “Really thought I was a goner.”

“Not getting out of your contract that easily.”

“Thank you, Matt. Truly.”

As the elevator doors parted, the sound of raised voices came flooding in. Sunny and Aaron in the middle of what looked like an intense discussion. Sunny towered over Aaron, while the slimmer man stood his ground, unimpressed by the other’s intensity.

I fell back into Myrddin.

If I said I wasn’t shaken by what Hastur offered, I’d be lying. And if the evidence that supported his claims grew too significant to ignore, I would at least try to keep an open mind. But that was the best I could do. Because I didn’t come here to save the world.

I came here to save my friend.

And burn this place to the ground.