A wet cough tore its way up his throat, rattling his ribs.
His stomach lurched. He retched, spitting out a mouthful of thick, black blood onto the cavern floor.
"...Fuck."
The ache in his knuckles was gone, replaced by the agony of Minervia’s rot. It felt like liquid glass was being pumped through his veins. Diseased black lines were already beginning to spread on his skin, creeping farther up his arm.
He was back in Virgil’s body, and it was still falling apart.
He stayed on the ground until he could breathe without coughing. The pain eventually eased, though it didn’t fully leave. He could still feel the rot moving beneath his skin.
Still, compared to the emotional execution he had just gone through, this was more bearable.
He spat the last string of bitter, black blood from his lips and forced his rotting legs to stand.
’I’m really back.’
He had spent months trapped in his ten-year-old body.
Now, the sheer mass of Virgil’s teenage frame felt almost alien. His heavy boots scraped against the floor as he swayed slightly, trying to feel for a wall.
’Virgil.’
He tried calling out mentally, reaching inward for the person whose body he stole.
But there was nothing.
There was only an endless, absolute silence. The darkness itself seemed to press in on him. The air felt impossibly heavy, with an oppressive atmospheric pressure that wanted to crush his chest like an anvil.
"Virgil?"
He tried calling again.
Once again, there was no answer. If Virgil was actually real, it seemed like he couldn’t hear Seth, or maybe he was ignoring him.
He began forcing his rotting legs to move, taking a heavy step forward into the darkness.
Seth, now inhabiting Virgil’s body, couldn’t tell how much time passed in here. There was only darkness, and the sound of his boots against the stone.
With every step, a sickly, white-hot glow beneath his skin burned brighter.
The light was weak, but it helped him see where he was going. He watched his feet as he shuffled forward, occasionally stopping when the pain in his chest forced him to rest.
Then he remembered the fire.
He remembered Maya, his mother, the bathroom. All of it had been part of the trial and had vanished when the flames consumed it.
Virgil, however, did not.
He could still picture the boy standing there, completely untouched by the fire he had started. He remembered the hand on his shoulder, and the strange feeling that accompanied it.
Before that trial, he had thought of himself as a passenger in Virgil’s body. He’d been the one making decisions, but it had never quite felt like the body belonged to him.
At first, he had believed it was because of the memories of two lives.
But the moment Virgil’s hand had touched his shoulder, something felt different.
He couldn’t explain it. He just knew that the separation he felt when he was in this body before was gone.
It no longer felt like he was borrowing the body, at least not in the way he had thought.
’Wonderful.’
He kept walking.
A wet cough tore up his throat. He stumbled, his heavy shoulder slamming against one of the cavern’s walls.
He leaned against the freezing rock until the dizziness passed, then raised his arm to get a better look at his hand.
He stared at his hand. It wasn’t the small, trembling hand that had gripped the bathroom doorframe. His fingers curled. The last time he had felt this hopeless, he had been standing outside that bathroom.
"Was it the right choice?"
The words echoed in the empty space. He waited for the wave of guilt to crash onto him.
It came hard.
He hadn’t expected an answer, but the question stayed with him.
The guilt bloomed into a heavy wound in his chest that hurt infinitely worse than the rot eating his veins.
He refused Virgil’s offer to take his emotions away despite the warnings.
And he’d ended up watching her die anyway.
He pushed off the wall and forced his legs to keep moving, rubbing his eyes.
"Fuck."
He didn’t want to think about it anymore.
But he couldn’t stop remembering her face.
He knew the Maya he’d seen wasn’t real. The trial had taken his memories and twisted them. Whatever she’d said in that bathroom, it wasn’t proof that she’d blamed him.
He understood that.
It just didn’t make him feel any better.
’I think I made the right choice.
If he had let Virgil amputate his feelings, he wouldn’t be mourning her. He would have forgotten her.
And he wasn’t willing to do that.
Even if keeping her memories hurt, he wanted to remember her. He wanted to remember the person she’d been, not the version the trial used against him.
The pain in his chest was the only proof that her life meant something.
Whether that made him strong or stubborn, he didn’t know.
He kept moving.
Suddenly, his boot struck something hard.
He stumbled, his hands instinctively shooting out to brace himself. His palms slammed into a surface.
He raised his arms, letting the sickly white light of his infected veins illuminate the space between him and the stone.
Stone.
Not quite.
It was too smooth to be natural, going as far as his eyes could see and carved directly into the rock of the cavern.
A gateway.
His glowing hands illuminated the center of the massive doors, there was no handle, instead, jutting out from the center of the gate was a shallow basin with sharp, rusted spikes.
"A blood toll."
He glanced at his hand, then at the sealed doors. The glowing lines of Minervia’s rot pulsed violently beneath his skin.
He hesitated for a moment.
Then he raised his hand and drove his palm into the rusted spikes. The metal tore through his skin and muscle, and a sharp pain shot up his arm.
He let out a low hiss as his knees buckled slightly, but he didn’t pull away. Instead, he leaned his weight against the stone, forcing the spikes deeper into his flesh.
Thick, black blood welled up around the metal, hissing as it coated the stone doors. The blood itself carried the sickly luminescence of the rot.
He watched as the basin filled up, his vision blurring at the edges.
Deep within the rock, a heavy, mechanical heartbeat thumped.
A deafening grind shook the floor beneath his boots. The spikes abruptly retracted, tearing free from his flesh.
He stumbled backwards, clutching his hand to his chest.
The towering doors finally began to part, releasing decades of stale air.
And without a second thought, he stepped through.