Sasrir moved like the thing he truly was. The degenerate shadow of a God, the container for His depravity and darkness, the vessel for His wounds and pain. The Dark Angel, the Deputy of Heaven, the Left Hand of God...the Hanged Man.
Sasrir returned to his quarters in silence, closing the door behind him with a soft click that felt strangely final. The room was dim, lit only by a few scattered candles—flames that leaned away from him rather than toward him. He lay down on the bed without even removing his boots, staring at the ceiling for a breath that stretched far too long to be human.
Then he sank.
Not into sleep, but straight through the layers of waking thought and consciousness, plunging into the place Adam had never visited—and never should. His Soul Sea.
It took form around him all at once, as if reality there snapped awake with him standing in its center. Compared to others' Soul Seas—calm lakes, storming oceans, orderly voids—Sasrir's was an impossibility. It shouldn't have existed. It contradicted itself. Yet it held.
It was a sea, yes, but no water lay in sight. Instead it was a roiling, endless spiral of colors—every hue imaginable and countless ones no human eye should ever perceive. Reds and greens melted into shades of ultraviolet whispers, while gold bled into something like sound made visible. The entire mass pulsed, swirled, fractured, and reformed constantly, a ceaseless creation and destruction in one motion. It felt like witnessing every sunrise and every apocalypse at once.
The "surface" of this kaleidoscopic maelstrom churned like a liquid madness, but stabbing out of its center was a single black mountain. Its slopes were formed of soil so dark it devoured light; dirt that looked like the burned remains of something once fertile. Sparks of color from the sea would fling themselves against its base, only to hiss, die, and be swallowed by the darkness.
Sasrir stood on the mountain's peak, boots sinking slightly into the dead earth. Despite the chaos below, up here the air was still—motionless, heavy, reverent.
At the summit stood the cross.
It was enormous, easily thrice Sasrir's height, forged not from wood nor metal but from liquid shadow. The substance flowed in slow, viscous waves, dripping upward instead of downward, defying gravity and reason alike. Every time a tendril slithered across the surface, the shadow seemed to whisper—not in words but in intentions and emotions, volatile ones, dangerous ones.
At irregular intervals, an outline appeared on the cross: a figure with five heads, each one too indistinct to name yet too real to dismiss. Sometimes it flickered. Sometimes it lingered. And sometimes one of the heads would tilt toward Sasrir as if acknowledging him before vanishing into black ripples.
He gazed upon it without bowing, without reverence—only with a patient, quiet acceptance. This was as familiar to him as breath.
But then a sound—not a sound, but the inversion of one—shivered across the sky.
Sasrir turned.
Above the horizon, the sky cracked.
Not like glass, but like bone. A fissure tore itself open from one end of reality to the other with a dull, shuddering snap. Through the fracture spilled a vast pressure, ancient and malign, until the crack ruptured entirely—
—and everything fell.
Blackish-red mud poured from the broken heavens in a roiling deluge. It wasn't water. It wasn't liquid. It wasn't even matter in the way the living understood it. It writhed as it fell, twisting like half-formed limbs and tangled nerves trying to remember what shape they once had. The mud splashed into the chaotic sea below, and where it landed, color recoiled as if in horror.
The rainbow vortex dimmed, shrank, sickened.
The mud spread like rot, turning brilliance to sludge, turning possibility to stagnant decay. It soaked the sea until feverish tendrils of corruption clawed at the mountain's base, itching to climb.
Sasrir watched it all in absolute silence.
Then he lifted one hand.
Color obeyed him instantly.
Swirling blobs of pure hue—crimson swarms, golden smears, shards of impossible blue—ripped themselves from the remaining pockets of untainted sea and spiraled upward toward him. They swelled, collided, merged grotesquely, corrupting themselves in their eagerness to serve. The bright shades bled together into ugly murk, then into pitch-black lumps of trembling substance.
A multitude of them. Dozens. Hundreds.
Each one swirling, warping, straining to become something they could not.
They gathered around Sasrir like a halo of corrupted creation, waiting for his will to shape them—or to unleash them.
All the while, the wounded sea writhed below. And above, the crack in the sky slowly began to recede away and fade.
Bringing one of the trembling black spheres before him, Sasrir studied the image within with a gaze utterly devoid of warmth. Detached. Clinical. The sphere pulsed once, its surface thinning just enough to reveal Adam—clutching his ribs, teeth grit as pain lanced through him. A memory. A moment. A wound.
Sasrir did not blink.
Another sphere drifted closer of its own accord, brushing lightly against his shoulder. Within it, Adam was feeding blood to the Unshadowed Crucifix, face tight with strain and a kind of quiet dread. Another floated upward to replace it—a scene of Adam sitting with one leg extended, wrapping a bandage around a deep cut on his thigh.
More gathered. More displayed their truths.
Dozens of orbs like little suffering planets. Hundreds, if one counted those hovering further off in miserable constellations. Most showed Adam. A smaller handful revealed Kai or Athena—Kai's fist split open on a monster's skull, Athena's shoulder crushed under the weight of a collapsing stone pillar. Gemma and Seishan were conspicuously absent, not because they had never been harmed, but because Sasrir had never once considered them his. They were teammates. Useful, occasionally. But not allies whose burdens he instinctively bore.
For every scene projected here was a moment—fleeting or catastrophic—when his Flaw, that cursed Scapegoat, had dragged the suffering of those closest to him into himself as well. The wounds they endured, the pain they swallowed, the fear they hid… all of it had echoed in his own flesh and bone.
The number of injuries was staggering. Bruised knuckles. Torn muscles. Split lips. Broken ribs. Lungs punctured. Limbs shattered. Organs ruptured. Poison in blood and blood on stone. The sheer volume of hurt was immense enough to make the average mind recoil.
Sasrir felt nothing.
Of course he did not.
This was his purpose. This was why he was made. To bear the world's sins. To take the wounds meant for others. To crumble so they might stand. To bleed so they might breathe.
He would do it willingly, endlessly, happily—so long as Adam remained safe.
His existence had been shaped by Adam's wish, pulled into being by the desperate, if subconsciouss, clarity of the young man's Envisioning. Adam had needed someone, and Sasrir had become that someone so thoroughly, so absolutely, that there was no part of him left untouched by that mandate.
So he played the part.
He joked. He teased. He played human when it mattered, shifted when it didn't. He steadied Adam's shaken resolve, grounded him when panic clawed, guided him when doubt threatened to break him. He made himself the anchor, the confidant, the companion—whatever the boy required.
And he would continue to do so always.
Even if it required secrets. Even if it required lies. Even if he had to act behind Adam's back, manipulating threads the young man could never perceive.
Adam might be angry if he knew. Might feel deceived. Might turn away.
Sasrir didn't care.
As long as Adam was safe. As long as Adam was happy.
And Adam would never need to know.
Once the visions of physical harm faded, new orbs drifted forward—heavier, darker, shaped not by bodies but by minds. These were not memories or images. They were raw emotions, distilled into spheres so dense they seemed to warp the air.
Sadness.
Regret.
Fear, sharp as broken glass.
Loneliness, cold as deep seawater.
Self-blame, thick as tar.
They pulsed weakly, radiating the poisonous weight of every moment Adam—or the others—had quietly broken on the inside.
Sasrir regarded these too, though his expression barely shifted. Slowly, almost gently, he ran a finger along the length of the nearest one. It shivered under his touch like a frightened animal.
Then, without a word, he turned toward the shadow-cross.
The orbs floated from his hand and rose upward in a slow, reverent procession. One by one they touched the liquid darkness, sinking in without a ripple, devoured wholly and silently.
When the final sphere vanished, the cross flickered.
The shadows shuddered, almost as if choking on what it had just swallowed. Then, with a stuttering pulse of black light, the five-headed silhouette appeared again—this time not flickering, but solidifying, even if only for a heartbeat.
And in the center of those five indistinct faces, a single vertical red eye snapped open.
It burned like a ruby filled with simmering fire.
A gaze of judgment. A gaze of hunger.
It stared at Sasrir.
The figure vanished, dissolving into ink-black ripples. The liquid cross settled once more—though its limbs now stretched ever so slightly wider, taller. A centimetre or two, perhaps more.
It had grown. Fed, strengthened by the negativity Sasrir had given to it.
Sasrir watched it with quiet understanding.