I expected to wake to the grey confines of a Peacekeeper prison. Instead, I found that I was still trapped under a sky filled with winding golden runes. Behind the runes, black clouds spun in a turbulent sky full of crackling flickers punctuated by booming thunder and the stabbing blades of crimson lightning. The wind had quieted into a cold but gentle breeze that caressed my face like silk and filled my nose with a scent reminiscent of freshly mowed grass.
I focused on the calming scent before turning my mind towards making sense of the situation. I closed my eyes and focused on what had happened.
My meditation was interrupted by a sharp pain that prevented me from taking deep breaths. My lungs burned, and my breathing was labored and uneven. I could feel my heart racing and sweat poured down my face despite the cool air and my own lack of exertion.
I swallowed and let out a gasp of agony. My throat burned and felt as if it were raw from gargling with shards of broken glass. I tried to push myself up, but the entire right half of my body was numb and unresponsive. My left arm was weak but I could move it. I sluggishly raised it above my face and stared at my own bruised knuckles for a second before letting the hand fall and come to a rest on my brow.
My arm slowly slid down my body to lay once more on the grass beside me, and I realized that nothing was covering me. My clothes, or at least my shirt, were gone. There was no translucent face mask, and the black armor no longer surrounded me.
The armor was not the only thing missing.
I remembered being surrounded by dirt after being forced into the ground by an overbearing pressure, yet I was somehow lying here on flat earth with nothing pressing down on me. Someone had helped me reach this point, but no one seemed to be around.
Had they just left me here to die?
I struggled to lift myself and cried out, but my voice was weak and hoarse. I only had the strength to grunt out a few short syllables, my words barely articulated and quickly swept away by the gentle susurrus of the calm spring breeze.
"Water, please..." I croaked. "Wa..." I struggled to push myself up with my left arm, but I lacked the strength to even roll over. I pushed up with my elbow and managed to lift my head and one shoulder for a moment. My strength was short lived, and I quickly fell flat on my back once more.
"Do not worry, Finn," said a voice that was my father's but also something more. "You are never alone. Not from now till end. Universes still unborn shall not outlive our song."
"Fisher," the word was nearly soundless and half-formed, but words were hardly needed. "Wa—" even as I began to ask two cupped hands parted my lips and a trickle of water flowed over my tongue. It was spectacular, like the sweetest thing I had ever tasted.
"You're broken, Finn," the Fisher said. "You gave too much for naught; the Devil, his due has taken." The creature paused for a moment while it fed me another mouthful of water. "Flesh has been rent. And we, cast off like detritus, foul and abandoned."
I held the water in my mouth for a moment, letting it seep into a parched tongue and cracked lips. I closed my eyes and swallowed the water. I took in a few slow and shallow breaths and I began to feel stronger and more lucid with each exhale.
It wasn't strength I was looking for, however, but courage.
I hesitated for a moment, but I finally commanded the Fisher to confirm my suspicions. I knew, but I had to see it for myself. "Show me," I said.
The creature did not share my hesitation and it quickly overwhelmed my senses with its own. The sensation was disorienting at first as conflicting images overlapped and overwhelmed my vision with hazy forms and blinding light. It was dizzying, but the feeling quickly passed.
I was left with the image of myself, lying on tall grass that had been pressed down all around me to create a bed. My face was bloodied and bruised, and one eye was swollen to the point it seemed impossible that it was open. My exposed torso was covered in small lacerations and my entire body was a patchwork of overlapping bruises in various shades of yellow and purple.
If that had been the extent of my injuries I would have been shocked that I was able to move at all. But that wasn't the worst.
A layer of black material, much like that which my armor had been made from, covered half my chest. It went from my sternum to where my right shoulder should have been – and there it stopped.
Nothing extended beyond that empty socket.
My arm was gone. The words couldn't form in my mind. I had expected to find my arm mangled and useless. Some Peacekeeper technology could have saved it, or magic could heal the damage. Didn't even mundane doctors reattach severed limbs all the time?
It was gone. There was more, however. The shape of my body was... wrong. My chest wasn't symmetrical, parts of my side and right pectoral were now a crater. My right shoulder didn't extend far enough out, as if it just ended right below my collar bone.
It was hard to see the full extent of the injuries, as the armor was surrounding them like an amorphous bandage. What I couldn't see, the missing pieces of myself, were enough for me to despair, but I fought against the realization. Surely some magic or some skill, anything... something could reverse this. I couldn't live the rest of my life crippled.
I knew what it was like to watch as strength and health quietly faded while sickness robbed a man of his dignity. I'd seen a strong man, a hero and a father, reduced to a mess of quivering muscles unable to lift a spoon or wipe his own ass.
I couldn't become that.
In the pits of my despair I laughed, and the Fisher joined me in its madness. Perhaps it was that or cry. The laughter quickly descended into anger and my lungs bellowed out screams of rage and threats of vengeance.
And yet, vengeance against whom? I could have left Telvy to fend for herself, or at least found a strategy that was less dangerous. I could have had freedom. I had become too sure of my own abilities and it had cost me. It had cost me everything.
I had done it for my friends, to protect them. Yet here I was, with no one to protect me. No one except...
"You," I said.
"Yes," a kingfisher circled my head twice before landing on my chest. My vision swam as every nerve in my body lit up in pain. "I see the will, your intentions clear, but words are still unspoken."
"You," the words came easier now. I pushed myself up a to sitting position with new found strength. My head felt like it was spinning from the quick motion, but I ignored it and spoke the words. "You can become my arm. Isn't that what you've been telling me this whole time?"
"We are one," as it finished speaking the bird flew up and expanded into smoke. The haze landed in front of me and took on the rough shape of a man. I recognized it as my own silhouette. Two red eyes burned on its otherwise shapeless face.
"Then do it," I said while meeting the creature's eyes. It seemed hungry, eager maybe, as if something it had long toiled for was finally presented at its feet.
"A hand lent to oneself, is no great feat."
In my delirium, I laughed hysterically at the creature's jest in short, choking bursts. My mirth was short lived. Pain flooded my mind as hands turned into sharp talons and began to pry open the armor on my chest. As the shell was peeled away the Fisher evaporated into tendrils of black liquid, like oil possessed and animated by a vengeful spirit.
The tendrils forced themselves under the lifted corner of the black armor and I could feel them burrowing and squirming as they forced themselves beneath my skin. It was like millions of rime-soaked razors digging away at my flesh and carving out a cavity in my chest. It stopped for a moment before I felt it begin to expand.
What was left of the black armor flew out like a projectile. I heard it slam into the ground to my right as a plume of dust and grass clippings shot into the air. Before the dust could settle, a bulge of tumorous flesh grew out from my shoulder and turned into a many tailed flail of black branches tipped and marbled with lines of flickering red embers.
I laughed once more, accepting the pain and the madness. As if sensing my acceptance, the branches of black oil wrapped around themselves like muscle fibers and spun until they were wound so tightly they appeared to be a single smooth tentacle of dark flesh.
As the tentacle shortened, it spread and shaped itself into the form of an arm. The empty cavity in my chest began to expand and fill, as well. I was beginning to feel whole once more, but the feeling was not quite right.
I looked down at my arm and watched as flesh folded away to reveal long, thin fingers. I willed them to move and they did so with flawless ease as if they had always been mine. The skin was jet black, but otherwise the arm resembled mine perfectly. There was even a small scar, a line of crimson on jet black, beneath my thumb. It was identical to the scar I had received as a child when I'd been bitten by a neighbor's dog.
I held the arm closer to my face and was amazed by the fidelity. It had fingerprints, creases on its knuckles and slight rises where I had once had veins on the back of my hand. Even the hairs on my forearm were perfect. Yet, I still couldn't place the feeling of something being off.
As I made a fist the realization came to me. I could move it, and even feel what it did, but the arm wasn't quite mine. I could feel the barrier between where it ended and I began, as if it were nothing more than a useful parasite. It was no more my own arm than a prosthetic limb would have been. It was incredibly useful, but ultimately interchangeable.
Despite the triumph of regaining my arm so quickly I felt only sadness. Disappointment. I could feel the strength that coursed through my new limb, and yet it wasn't mine. I could only draw on it so much – and I knew that the Companion was still free to come and go as it pleased.
It had a kind of freedom that I lacked. That was what I wanted. Freedom. Strength was only a means of gaining it.
That momentary clarity into my own motives was enlightening and I made a realization. I'd heard similar words before, but never truly understood. Freedom was never given but had to be taken. I had an arm, I merely had to take it...
Throughout my body were thin wires, an intricate web of eldritch energy. This web filled my entire form, but each thread was thin and weak and so the entire structure was insubstantial. If I could drive those wires into the arm I could fuse with it more completely – it would become part of a whole rather than a removable attachment.
As I began my experiment I expected a struggle from the Fisher, but it was unusually quiet. Perhaps it too was curious to see the results.