It begins, as many slow descents into psychological ruin do, with hunger and blind trust in a man he'd only ever met in a dream. Well, some descents. This one was a little more... bespoke.
"No food," Matter says with the same infuriating calm that suggests starvation is merely another item on a healthy lifestyle checklist. "No comforts of the flesh. The ritual requires your spirit to be cleansed."
Right.
Because apparently malnutrition had been rebranded as enlightenment.
The fast is meant to last ten days, ending on his twenty-first birthday. Matter calls it a rite of passage. Aster privately settles on creative suicide with spiritual branding.
So he does what he’s told, because he’s stupid, and because Matter, for all his maddening vagueness, has yet to actually lie to him. So he fasts.
The first day isn't terrible. His body assumes he's forgotten to eat.
Day two is war.
His stomach starts fomenting a rebellion. His limbs twitch like haunted marionette strings. We’ve been starving for four years and now you’re doing it on purpose?!
By the fourth, even his brain, normally the voice of reason, is staging surrealist dinner theatre.
The fridge becomes a brothel of desire.
The yoghurt whispers about meeting in secret, lids off.
The cheese offers to supervise, somewhere between concerned friend and lascivious uncle.
And the butter... the butter doesn’t even knock.
It wants to be spread onto the rest. It wants eye contact. It’s soft, golden, and smells like forbidden weekends. It slides around in his mind like a lounge singer in a silk robe, crooning forbidden promises of guilt, toast and desire.
Aster begins to suspect hunger hallucinations have a disturbingly active imagination.
But the real torment comes when he closes his eyes to sleep—when he should find rest, sweet unconsciousness.
Instead, every night, without fail, he wakes up.
In the Astral Plane with Matter already there, looking perfectly rested, infuriatingly composed, and entirely too pleased with himself.
The first time it happens, Aster stares at him through a fog of hunger and sleep deprivation.
“Why am I here?” he asks. “I didn’t smoke the elixir again.”
Matter folds his hands behind his back. “The elixir was only needed to loosen your Bio-Field. Its effects are now permanent. Until your eventual Severing, your spirit will remain bound to your Material Vessel during the day and cross over at night when you sleep.”
Aster blinks at him. “That’s not how sleep works.”
Matter shrugs. “It is now. Time to train your Will.”
That becomes the rhythm of the next ten days.
By day, Aster stumbles through the house like a fasting corpse in borrowed skin, too hungry to think straight and too stubborn to stop. By night, he wakes in the Astral Plane and gets dragged into another session of whatever fresh torment Matter has decided counts as spiritual growth.
Every time Aster tries to ask about the ritual, the Wyrm, or any of the dozen questions currently trying to claw their way out of his skull, Matter redirects him with polite, surgical efficiency.
“That’s a good question. You’ll understand it better after your vessel stabilizes.”
“Ask me again once you’ve reached Acolyte rank.”
“We’ll get there. Right now? More Will practice.”
At first, Aster thinks this is a joke. He’s never practiced Will in his life.
Which was somehow done by him guiding a tiny gem through a nightmare collaboration between a child’s bead maze and a bomb-disposal course.
Touch the wire? Buzzer.
Drop the gem? Buzzer.
Think too hard about food? Buzzer.
Try to ask a question mid-task? Louder buzzer.
He fails constantly. Heroically. In ways that feel statistically impressive.
Matter offers exactly zero sympathy.
“Try again.”
“Why does it buzz?” Aster asks on night four, rubbing his temples like he’s trying to erase the memory of existence. “This is the Astral Plane. There are rules here. Sacred geometry. Divine law. You’re telling me someone installed a buzzer?”
Matter doesn’t look up from his notes. “It’s motivational.”
Aster stares at him for a full minute.
“Okay. Fine. What’s the point of this? What am I actually training?”
Matter finally glances up. “Your Will.”
“That’s not an answer, it’s a loop. You’re defining the word with itself. It’s like saying I need to work on my ‘soul-ness.’”
“Exactly. Back to practice.”
Aster grinds his teeth so hard the Astral version of his molars probably needs filing.
On night six, he finally finishes it, only to be rewarded with the wire loop being swapped out for a solid enclosed tube.
Aster stares at it, jaw slack. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Matter, deadpan as a tax audit: “Now you must feel the gem without relying on sight”
Aster opens his mouth. Closes it. Considers violence.
Instead, he sits. Closes his eyes.
What follows can only be described as a breakdown masquerading as spiritual growth.
He tries everything: breathing exercises, blind concentration, mentally threatening the gem, bargaining with it, attempting to seduce it with kindness. Nothing works.
Until, slowly, something changes.
Not a revelation. Not some glorious choir of enlightenment. Just… weight.
Not physical weight. Something stranger. The sense of the gem’s presence settling into his mind until it stops feeling like an object and starts feeling like a fact. Like part of the room. Part of the shape of things. When he focuses, he can feel where it is without touching it, without seeing it, the same way he can feel where his tongue sits in his mouth without having to look at it.
He closes his eyes.
Reaches.
The gem lifts.
Not much. Barely an inch. But it rises.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Then it falls back down with a soft click against the inside of the tube.
Aster’s eyes snap open.
“I did it.”
Matter actually looks surprised.
"Interesting."
"You sound disappointed."
"No," Matter says slowly. "Merely surprised."
He studies the gemstone as though it has personally violated several laws of nature.
"The relic is functioning correctly."
Aster narrows his eyes.
"...Relic?"
Matter clears his throat.
"I may have neglected to mention the Absent Labyrinth is a Divine-grade Will cultivation relic, by finishing the second level you’re Will has been touching the Saint level"
Aster stares. “Saint-level? Divine-level? Are you grading me with a church tier list now?”
He floats the stone again, absent-mindedly looping figure eights in the air like a smug hedge-witch auditioning for a coven.
Matter shrugs. “That’s the scale we’re working with—Initiate, Acolyte, Saint, Divine. Standard cultivation metrics. Used to rank people based on how likely they are to obliterate their surroundings when mildly inconvenienced.”
“And I’m an Initiate?” Aster ventures.
Matter sucks air through his teeth in that universal gesture of not quite.
Aster blinks. “Saint. Level. I’ve been starving for close to two weeks, half-conscious, doing this in my sleep, all because you gave me a saint-tier trial as a warm-up?”
Matter looks mildly sheepish. “The higher your Will, the better the surgery outcome. And, well... it kept you busy. Gave me a chance to get some work done without your endless questions.”
Aster blinks.
Once.
Twice.
Then, without breaking eye contact, he lifts the gem and launches it across the room with a precise mental flick.
It smacks Matter squarely in the forehead.
Doesn’t even faze him.
He smiles. “Good control.”
Aster stands, turns, and walks out of the Astral chamber, muttering something about “finding the nearest divine complaint box.”
_________________________________________________________________________________
“Happy fucking birthday to me,” Aster mutters.
Twenty-one.
Legal adult. Spiritual liability. Host to a cosmic parasite and ten days deep into a starvation ritual with a dead man’s friend who treats emotional comfort like a moral failing.
He spends the morning pacing through 7 Heart Lane like a ghost with commitment issues, too weak to focus and too stubborn to lie down. His stomach has gone beyond hunger and into something quieter and meaner, a gnawing hollowness that feels less like pain and more like his body filing a formal complaint.
He half expects something to happen. A sign. A flicker. Some divine acknowledgement that he has, against all reason, survived another year.
Instead he gets silence.
No message. No revelation. Just the same house, the same dread, and the increasingly unpleasant awareness that he’s about to spend his birthday doing Will drills in another plane of existence.
The universe, as ever, remains committed to the bit.
Crossing over that night is as unceremonious as ever. No transcendent glow, no spiritual gravitas. Just the now-familiar yank of sleep giving way to Astral gravity.
Same room. Same table. Same exhausted outrage.
Matter doesn’t even look up from his notes.
“You’re late.”
Aster opens his mouth, but Matter cuts him off.
“The ritual needs final preparations. Continue with your training until I call for you.”
Aster rubs at the back of his neck. “You know, most people get cake on their birthdays. Maybe balloons. At minimum some performative affection. I get divine detention.”
Matter glances at him at last. “Consistency builds strength.”
“Yeah,” Aster mutters, “so does protein.”
He goes back to the labyrinth to continue practicing .
The gem wobbles.
BZZZZZT.
Aster closes his eyes.
The gem wobbles again.
BZZZZZT.
Apparently Will made manifest is just rage in a tasteful container.
He doesn’t hear Matter approach until the man stops beside him.
“The ritual is ready.”
The gem slips again and clips the side of the tubing.
BZZZZZT.
Aster’s pulse kicks. The ritual. Ready. Suddenly all the abstract dread of the last ten days condenses into something cold and immediate.
Matter studies him for a moment. “Go prepare yourself. Head to the tablet when you’re done. You remember what to do?”
Aster gives him a tired, crooked look. “Yes, you’ve only told me fifty times. Stay on the guided path when the pain hits. Don’t panic. Use my Will to keep the ritual aligned.”
Matter nods once and starts to turn away.
Then he stops.
For a second he just stands there, back to Aster, shoulders stiff.
When he speaks, his voice is low.
“Your parents really did love you. Don’t ever forget that.”
He reaches into his robes and pulls out a chain.
A small pendant ring dangles from it, simple and worn smooth with age.
“Happy birthday,” Matter says. “It belonged to your father.”
Aster goes very still.
His fingers close around the ring automatically. It’s warm. Not body-warm. Something deeper. As if it’s been sitting in sunlight for years and never quite cooled.
He opens his mouth. “Why—”
Matter glances back at him, and something in that look kills the question before it’s fully formed. Not secrecy. Something heavier than that.
Aster feels something in his chest loosen and ache at the same time.
For a moment, despite the hunger and the fear and the fact that he’s about to let a magical stranger perform spirit surgery on him, he feels horribly, inconveniently human.
Then Matter is gone.
_________________________________________________________________________________
The ritual tablet is freezing under Aster’s bare back.
He lies still on the stone slab, trying not to think about how much it resembles the opening scene of a very niche murder documentary. The carved grooves beneath him press into his skin in looping, intricate channels, too complex to follow and too deliberate to ignore. He can feel them humming faintly under the surface, as if the tablet is less carved than awake.
The room is dark except for the thin suggestion of dawn leaking through the cracks. Incense thickens the air until every breath tastes like ash and old prayer.
Matter steps into view wearing different robes.
Not really black. Black implies fabric. This is something deeper, a starless void threaded with faint constellations and ghost-light, as if someone skinned a night sky and tailored it.
For the first time since all this began, Aster feels genuinely small.
Matter stops at the edge of the tablet. “Ready?”
Aster swallows. “As ready as a man can be while voluntarily lying down for ritual parasite surgery.”
Matter ignores that. He traces a series of symbols through the air, movements precise and practiced, and then produces a small white disc from his sleeve. Red glyphs cover both sides, pulsing faintly like embers under ash.
Every instinct in Aster’s body tells him to get up and run.
Matter’s voice stays calm. “When this activates, you’ll face the Wyrm. Follow the pain and guide it along the path I showed you. Don’t let it drift. Don’t let it break your focus.”
Aster nods because his throat is too dry for speech.
Matter meets his gaze. For once there’s no detached patience in his face. Just something sad. Final.
“Good luck.”
Then the disc cracks.
The world tears open.
Aster falls through blackness as if every atom in him has been pried loose and flung into the dark. Pain spears through his skull, white-hot and jagged, and his body twists in ways his mind can’t follow.
His eyes snap open.
The Wyrm is waiting.
It towers over him, a mountain of chitin and sinew and wrongness. Hundreds of legs flex beneath it, each movement producing a dry, grinding click that makes his teeth hurt.
The pressure of its attention hits like a tidal wave.
Hungry. Ancient. Familiar.
And in that instant, every half-formed terror he’s ever carried in his chest slots into place.
This is it.
This thing has been with him his whole life.
It stole his family. Hollowed out every chance he ever had. Turned his life into one long sequence of collapse and almost and not-quite.
Something in him stops wanting to run.
His fists clench.
No more.
The void around the Wyrm shifts, and suddenly Aster can see the ritual below them.
It sprawls beneath the creature like the circuitry of a mad god—massive, intricate, and alive with pulsing symbols that seem less written than grown. The Wyrm sits at the centre of it all like an engine jammed into the heart of a machine too large to understand.
Above, a light begins to gather.
At first it’s faint. Then it swells, white folding into gold until it becomes a searing point of brilliance.
Pain tears through Aster’s spine.
His whole body convulses. His soul—if he still has one in any recognizable format—screams.
But somewhere inside the agony, he feels it: the point Matter told him to guide. The path. The line the ritual needs him to hold.
He reaches for it.
The light answers.
It feels like dragging molten wire through his own chest. Every inch of movement is a fresh violation, a bright surgical cruelty threading itself through his nerves. But he keeps it moving, forcing the line through the ritual pattern with everything he has left.
Below him, the Wyrm thrashes.
Its body convulses in time with the runes, resistance slamming into him in waves. Something inside it claws back, furious and vast, but Aster grits his teeth and keeps guiding the light.
Time dissolves.
Pain stretches until it becomes the only measurable thing in existence. His body is gone. His thoughts are gone. There is only the line, the ritual, and the refusal to let either slip.
Then—
He finishes.
The pattern is complete.
For one suspended moment, everything hangs motionless.
The Wyrm.
The void.
Aster himself.
Then the light returns.
Blinding. Surgical. Holy in a way that feels less comforting than invasive.
A figure appears before the Wyrm, outlined in gold.
Aster squints through the glare and feels his heart break before his mind catches up.
Matter.
No robe. No mystery. Just him, radiant and heartbreakingly sad.
His cyan eyes meet Aster’s.
Aster, Matter’s voice echoes directly into his mind. I’m sorry. There was no other way. For the Wyrm to enter chrysalis and complete the ritual, it needed to feed on a spirit.
No.
The thought doesn’t even feel like language. Just impact.
Matter—
I promised your parents I would protect you.
The Wyrm stirs.
Its jaws open.
Aster lurches forward, reaching for him, but he’s too far away, too slow, trapped in the impossible lag between understanding and loss.
Matter—
Shake this world, Aster. For me. For Howard. For Seni.
Then the Wyrm simply takes him.
Swallowed whole.
Erased with the casual brutality of something too vast to register what it has destroyed.
For a second there is only absence.
Then the ritual collapses.
Light detonates outward. Sound tears apart. The entire void convulses as if something fundamental has just been ripped out of it, and Aster feels it happen inside himself too—something stitching him to reality giving way all at once.
He falls.
Not through space.
Through himself.
As if whatever held him together has finally, mercifully, snapped.