Cycle of Ruin - Arrival: A LitRPG Series

Chapter 26

Leo took a step back, slowly spinning in a circle as he watched the screens surrounding them lay bare every embarrassing and private moment of his life. He reached out and tried to touch the nearest apparition, but his hand phased through the ghostly image as the video continued to play.

It projected a beautiful starry sky, with the arms of the Milky Way stretching across the heavens like a winding river of light. It was one of the nights Melody had dragged him along to go stargazing in the nearby mountain range a few miles from where they lived.

Her bubbling enthusiasm for the outing never seemed to dampen, even while climbing the steep trek to the summit. Although she was never the one to lug up her massive telescope, it still wounded his pride when he was always the only one out of breath after reaching the peak.

"Ah, an Arrival. I see Lazarus is still sowing the same seeds of chaos he has for a millennium. And what have we here, a dissociation?" The mutterings drew Leo's attention and he found Thanatus flipping through images at a blurring pace with one hand, while the other paused upon a projection of murky grey. He flicked his wrist and hundreds of similar projections gathered, each one resembling a television screen that had turned to static. "A severance of three months during your life on Earth. Sloppy work, hardly worth my time to undo, but perhaps just a peek..."

The outline of the images began to glow with a heat that scalded Leo's soul. The floors and ceilings of the coffee shop began to rumble and churn, mugs fell from shelves, shattering on the ground, and an old stool toppled over to break in a heap of splintered wood. The murky grey substance on the images bubbled as the glow continued to intensify, frothing up the sides of their containers to slowly drip on the shaking floor below.

For all the searing pain made him feel as if he were being boiled alive, his eyes remained glued to the slowly clearing projections. They were his lost memories, the answer to why he had agreed to come here. With every drop of the grey fluid, a new scene flashed in his mind.

He saw himself shaking hands with a smiling businessman, overtly pleased to make his acquaintance. The scene shifted to Melody hurrying out of the coffee house with a wave as she went to catch up with a group of her friends for their usual walk to school. Then he found himself staring down at a cold stone floor, blood pooling at the tiles by his feet and the smell of gun smoke hanging heavy in the air. He couldn't stop staring at the pistol clenched in his clammy hands.

The influx of memories along with the pain came to a sudden halt. Leo found himself lying on the ground of the coffee shop, unsure if the groaning he heard was coming from the old floorboards or his own lips as he stared at a pair of legs hovering over him. "Enough of that, I have what I came here for. I'll set the seal to degrade in time so while your dreams may be restless, you won't be completely obliterated by the divine magic breaking apart."

Leo slowly managed to squirm to his knees until he was staring up at the being guised as his former mentor. As if his thoughts had given shape to reality, the man's form shimmered from Zeld's pearly white skin to a scaled draconic black, before quickly reverting.

"As I am the most benevolent of all my kin, I will give you not one but three rewards for bringing me, albeit unwittingly, to this mortal plane." He held out a single finger. "The first is your shrouded memories unmolested. The lock that binds them shall fail a little at a time, and each time it will leave you in a state such as this. If you ever find yourself succumbing to impatience, you may come back to your soulspace to fully repair or break the seal that I cracked."

He lifted a second finger. "The second is knowledge. Your sister, the one you call Melody, was either brought to Asylum or has perished on Earth. I've arranged it so her fate will only be revealed once the lock has fully failed." Thanatus spoke the news with a cruel smile, the words brokering stillness in Leo's mind.