Time passed by like a whisper on the breeze, aimless and swift. It sifted through the rabble on the street, looking for potentially juicy victims without actually perceiving their existence. It chose them at random, life’s great roulette, touching those with no true destiny, marking them out for the children of chaos to toy with as they would. Time and chaos, merciless and efficient, unrivaled in their mastery of human manipulation. Time created the victims, with a little help from destiny, but it was always chaos who ended them.

Akita had suffered greatly in his life. His parents’ death, his master’s abandonment, personal follies, fool dreams of becoming great and wonderful and world renowned, everything had forced him onward to this path, yet now nothing guided him but the wind and his thirst. Had he not taken to adventuring so early, had he simply stayed with his master and perfected his skills, he wouldn’t have become so addicted to the rush of near-death experiences. To having friends. He pushed the thoughts aside once more and trudged onward, down the hard-packed dirt road, through the rotting forestry, ever onward, looking for the next big reward. Onward to slay the dragon…

The sun hang hot and heavy in the air, barely inches from the earth, it seemed. It scorched Aki’s skin and purged the land around him of moisture. Not even the plants dared risk prolonged exposure, and every living thing shrank away from the heat, seeking refuge in shade. He saw jackals lying dead or dying in the shadows, starving to death but no longer able to move or chase their prey. He saw rabbits and voles, mice and snakes, all of them half eaten or simply dead. He saw the corpses of their predators not far away, and like the jackals, none seemed fit to move. Chaos was sweeping through the area, killing indiscriminately and leaving time to clean up the mess.

There was no sign of civilization-- the road had been a straight path into oblivion for the last three days and it looked like it would stay straight for another thirty years-- there was nothing interesting to look at, everything was the same, nothing was even remotely different, it was mind numbing. Akita let his mind drift, pondering why everything was so dead. It could be a miasma from the east; he had heard about a new crop plague in the last village, maybe it had mutated and was infecting the animals too. But… then… wouldn’t he be infected? So, it probably wasn’t that. He settled on drought after thinking back on everything he’d seen, the dehydrated plants, the cracked earth, the signs of brushfire, it made more sense. Why hadn’t he come to that conclusion before? It was so damn obvious.

Something ripped through Akita’s gut like a saw chewing through wood. His vision blurred, two worlds split, collided, became one, and split again, he fell to his knees and retched hard. It felt like he was going to vomit out his vital organs, but nothing came. He could taste blood in the back of his throat, acrid and metallic. He retched again. Akita collapsed onto his side, convulsing on the dusty road, breathing in particles of dirt and pollen making him retch harder than before. This time something did come out, a piece of squishy flesh coated in blood. He stood and vomited again, forcing more of his own insides to fly out onto the packed dirt, painting the brown terrain in a pint of his blood. His head absolutely swam in pain. The world was a sea of excruciating colors, spinning into a single blur; everything was getting dark but it was still so horrendously bright.

He felt something touch his shoulder. A shiver seized his spine and shot numbing electricity through his limbs. The pain ceased immediately. Blood trickled out of his mouth as he smiled and embraced his own death. He closed his eyes and let his body fail, organ by organ as he had learned it would. The metabolic processes of each cell would break down and the cell would die; the process would be en masse, it wouldn’t take any time at all, in fact he had already experienced the worst of it. Something happened, though. His body moved of its own accord. He stood again and took a step forward, then another, and another. He opened his eyes and saw that he was actually running full sprint. The world was whole again, he could see perfectly and he couldn’t feel a thing; he only knew that his limbs were moving without him, driven by some will he hadn’t believed he possessed. It wasn’t perfect, he still spewed blood every few seconds, and it was all over him now, coating the front of his chest and spattering his legs. He thought there was even some on his lucky pack, dangling from it’s single strap, bouncing along on his back.

After about a mile, he estimated, his body veered right, without warning, into a huge clearing. There was a city! Right there! He was so close! His automaton body flew past the scant number of people right outside the gate, tending to their hypocritically fertile crops and chasing children down to bring them in for the day. He left the city gate behind him in his rush, passing guards that didn’t seem concerned with the sprinting trespasser in the least. Aki wondered where he was, he wondered what was happening to him, he wondered how his body knew where to go, what to do, how to move again. He blew past the other pedestrians who didn’t pay him a single ounce of attention, taking seemingly random alleys, cutting through the thick crowds without a single misstep. He bounded through two huge double doors into a lobby-type area in a large white building. It seemed this was his final destination, as whatever force controlling his body up to this point saw fit to release him. He lost control of everything once more-- while in the middle of a dead run. His limbs splayed and flailed uselessly as he tripped and tumbled at an incredible speed, colliding with the wall at the far end of the room. His skull splintered the wooden surface and he heard a resounding crack, but if it was the wood or his bone, he didn’t know. He laid limp on the floor, consciousness rapidly fading to nothing. The last thing he remembered was a group of like-dressed men crowding around him and laying their hands on him. Then the world was black.

---

He awoke several days later in the same building he had died in. It was a healing facility, a school where healers young and old came to practice their various magics. They told him he had died in the middle of the healing, probably right after he lost consciousness. They told him they didn’t know how he made it there, that his body should have been so wracked with pain he couldn’t possibly have stood, nevertheless ran. He tried to tell them he didn’t run there, that his body moved without him, but they dismissed it as delusion. They talked amongst themselves for a long time, debating his sanity and what the body was capable of, but they finally settled on the brain. They told him with self-assured smiles that the will to live was sometimes even greater than magic. They told him that something in his brain had sensed the town was nearby, had kick-started the processes that numbed his body and allowed him to run, and had sought out the area with the greatest concentration of magic. Everybody was capable of sensing magic, they claimed, it was just one of the lost arts hidden in the back of our minds. They were full of shit.

Something had taken control of his body and saved his life. There was no possible way his brain could manage all of that by itself, it wasn’t even working properly at the time. All of him was in the middle of dying, his brain included. Whatever happened, it was because of this city, this place, these people, something, anything. This had to be what he was searching for all his life, this place was the ultimate treasure. It had to be.

This was the only place old injuries no longer ached, the only place he felt right and sane. Ever since he entered the city, things were just better; he was more creative, more outgoing, more carefree and happy, he was normal again. He felt inspired to take up the hammer once more and began another apprenticeship under a blacksmith nearly as capable as his old master. He remembered things that used to wake him in the night, screaming at the top of his lungs, and was no longer afraid! He slept.

It wasn’t the changes to himself that convinced him of the place’s value either. There were so many different glories in the city, most didn’t have names. Exotic animals unlike any from Xexoria wandered about the city, tame as mice; colors were more vibrant, art was more realistic yet at the same time completely surreal, he watched three men paint the entire side of a three story building, covering it in a great mosaic, in less than a day; people were more diverse than in even the greatest city back home. People of all creeds and beliefs existed peacefully side by side, perfect neighbors. There was crime, of course, but the guards always seemed two steps ahead of the perpetrators, and there was virtually no murder. Most miraculously, though, were the gods.

The people always referred to the city as blessed, but Akita had never known why-- until he witnessed one of the gods firsthand. He was right by the main gate when it happened, a bright light burst into white flame before the guardhouse and swirled violently for several seconds before solidifying into the form of a man. His form rippled as clothes settled on his shoulders, a great satin robe, all of the purest white before melting into the most stunning golden yellow. The sky blackened and went through a similar rippling transformation, settling on the same golden yellow hue as the being standing before him. He called himself Zitrone, and Akita realized that this was the god responsible for naming and founding the town. He was the most frequent visitor of the city, and brought with him the greatest miracles, or so the various legends told. This visit, he announced a stupendous change that was soon to come, an influx of people so great it would push the city to its limits. He asked that everyone cut down more of the decaying forest around them and make the city even larger and more magnificent in preparation for their coming. He also said he would reward them for their troubles, and declared the next two weeks days of celebration and progress.

The sky changed once more, taking on the normally ephemeral properties of the aurora and expanding from horizon to horizon. From behind the god there burst forth two great beasts, multicolored and magnificent to behold. The creatures dwarfed both the god and the humans around him, and very nearly didn’t fit in the open square. They let forth a fantastic roar that rattled and shook the earth before bounding further into the city, leaving behind massive piles of food and wine in their wake. Wherever the creatures landed, similar piles sprung up as if by magic, and it WAS magic as far as the people were concerned. Their god was performing miracles, they were being rewarded for a task he had assigned, there was nothing more natural or perfect in the world.

The people feasted for three days and three nights. No one slept, for they didn’t need sleep. Their god was taking care of their fatigue, their famine, their wants and desires; they were automatons with single minded purpose. They began building, and the more workers on a job, the faster it was built, the greater it seemed, and the more magnificent the construction. Apartments climbed five stories tall with beautiful facades; smithy forges and craftsmen’s dens became the epitome of practicality and aesthetics rolled into one; schools and taverns were built, sprawling tall and high with picturesque friezes, flawless in design. Without rest and without mishap the city nearly doubled in size. Eleven days passed and the construction ended exactly when Zitrone had declared. On the twelfth day, the people rested, and life returned to normal.

Akita was caught up in the experience as much as the others. He paid special attention to one of the new smithies, he felt like he was making it his. He built the entire forge by himself, along with the billows and water tank. He carved stonework more beautiful than he thought he was capable of, he solved design problems with greater ease than any professional carpenter or stonemason could ever boast of, and what’s more, all the people of Zitrone seemed to have the same supernatural knowledge of whatever it was they were working on. They were all masters of every field, and no one person knew any more than the villager standing next to them. Akita was truly amazed. When he was finished, though, when he was resting with the others in the older section of the city, he couldn’t help but feel unfulfilled. While he was working he hadn’t noticed, but now that he was drifting off to sleep, he noticed a certain emptiness. An antsy desire to never stop, to continue doing something, anything, everything. He slept in spite of his unease.

The immigrants came soon after construction was completed, and Zitrone made another appearance-- along with some unnamed god associated with the harvest somehow. Akita was too busy trying to improve his skills as both a fighter and a smithy to notice anything that didn’t involve him, and he was trying his hardest to put anything otherworldly out of his head. The foreboding sensation he had felt after the godly work binge only increased over the next few weeks, and it troubled him greatly. In fact, it was the only thing that troubled him at all, and it seemed to trouble only him. He had asked his master about it, vaguely probing, but the old blacksmith simply grinned and said it was all in his head. Maybe it was, but there had to be a reason it was only him. He wasn’t the only outsider-- nearly all the people in the city claim to have been outsiders at some point-- and he wasn’t the most recent, obviously. Something had to be singling him out, but what?


He wandered around the city searching for clues, testing what made the feeling grow, seeing what tugged at him the most, and for the longest time he ignored the only thing that seemed to make a difference. He and everyone else ignored it’s existence entirely, never really making eye contact, always giving it a wide berth, planning trips to the other side of the city completely circumventing it, even though it sat square in the center. When asked, nobody really knew why they did it, or really even that they did. They’d look at you like you were crazy for even mentioning it, and perhaps you were. Aki certainly felt like he was.

He was basing his entire theory on why his brain was acting up so much on a ten foot cement wall. Granted, he was betting it was whatever was behind the wall, but all he had to go on was its ominous, unexplainable existence, and the strange effects it produced on the townsfolk. The same strange effects it produced on him too, until he discovered it’s existence. It was strange, he was focusing on nothing but that sinking, dread feeling, walking around trying to concentrate on where it made him feel the absolute worst, and in the midst of all this concentrating, he ran into a wall for the second time during his stay in Zitrone. Touching it that first time was horrific, it amplified all the effects he had been privilege to while in the city-- both good and bad-- to an unbearable degree, and he nearly cried in joy and wept in grief at the same time. The feeling passed, but his curiosity didn’t. He had to know what was behind that wall, even if it killed him. It had to be the secret to this place, the looming feeling’s origin, the reason why he was here. He had to climb that wall, so peer beyond its obscurity. It was fate, and who was he to argue with fate? It had ruled his life up ‘til now anyway, what was another few days?

---

Akita jumped the wall just after midday. He thought it was midday, anyway, the sun was certainly passed its zenith when he reached the thing and it didn’t take him THAT long to scale a ten foot concrete surface. Granted, it took longer than it should have, as he had to make sure nobody was watching, but after he started cursing at the top of his lungs because he smashed his hand in the folding apparatus of the ladder, he learned it wouldn’t have mattered if he exploded into a brilliant ball of flame. No matter what he did, not a single passer-by--what scant few there were-- would turn their head in his direction. Made things easier for him, at least. If they wanted to ignore the blatantly obvious, they could go ahead and lead their oblivious little lives. He was positively starving to learn what lie behind that impenetrable concrete.

It wasn’t scaling the wall that was the problem, though. He climbed up and over the thing, but on the other side… Well, there was no damn wall anymore. There was no damn city behind him anymore. It was dark! It was raining! Thick, saturated, booming clouds collided and sparked above him. An endless expanse stretched out behind him. It was like he leapt into a parallel universe! Was that what waited behind the wall that nobody acknowledged?

He looked around for some kind of light source to show him the way, but even when the lightning flashed he couldn’t see anything. Just empty nothingness that stretched on for miles. Like a desert, but even more featureless. He even took a few steps back in the direction he had come from, where the wall should have been, but after a few yards without coming into contact with anything, he figured he really had leapt into oblivion.

He tried his hand at the small bit of alchemy he had learned during the course of his childhood, but he had neglected it so much during his travels he couldn’t even remember the first lesson. Another part of his life lost to fate and fortune. Or lack thereof, anyway. He scrounged through his pockets, but apparently everything he had brought with him was gone. Great, that meant someone had pick pocketed him. GREAT! What the blissful hell was going on?

A small light flickered in the distance. Two lights flickered in the distance. A third and fourth sprang to life. The lightning flashed again, a brilliant purple beam in the dark, and illuminated a path that Aki was certain hadn’t been there before. Okay, so it seemed there was more to this place than met the eye. He started walking the path, and soon discovered the lights in the distance were brilliant torches, completely unwavering despite the pounding winds. Each time he passed one set, another sprang to life farther down. He couldn’t see an endpoint, but hell, at least he knew where to go now.

After walking the unwaveringly straight path for just a little less than a mile, the torches stopped, and the rest of the way was bathed in pitch. The winds had ceased, but a light rain began to mist across the world. Akita turned and meant to go back to where he had started, but found the torches had been extinguishing themselves behind him. There were only the two immediately beside him, now, and those began slowly dissolving into the black as well. The darkness settled like a threatening beast around him, enveloping even his thought. He wasn’t sure he even had a body anymore. He was confused, but he seemed to be taking it in relative stride. This wasn’t his world, he didn’t expect it to act like it.

Lightning struck somewhere close by and startled the beast. Buildings flashed out of the fog and tarry blackness around him, and he realized he was in the center of a small village. Had the lights simply ruined his vision and obscured the buildings…? He walked up to the nearest and felt it with the whole of his hand. It was the first solid structure he had come across in this place. It was the first thing that made sense. Was it real?

He looked around, but found nothing else. Just the empty, soulless buildings, hollowed to the core by the invisible rodent of time. Most of what he saw was decrepit-- there were no new buildings-- but some had weathered the years better than others. They were still blackened by the consuming night of the world, and Akita could barely see more than a few yards in front of him. It was then he heard a sound that chilled him to the core.

A magnificent, booming roar shattered the silent skies. The shadow of a great, winged form stretched forebodingly above, and already the dragonfear began to worm its way into Akita’s heart. His chest throbbed in terror, and he went to his knees in a fit of convulsions. Memories of the past ripped through his mind and a familiar, childish need to run and hide ransacked his good sense. He looked up and saw others just like him emerge from the darkness, gaunt and haggard, desperately fleeing. Most were ancient, but they found legs to run on, and arms to drag their children behind them. The children were awful, with bellies bloated from malnutrition and teeth rotten from complete abuse. They fled in the same direction of the dragon, though, not away.

He understood why. After getting to his feet, a wretched shriek pierced his ears and his organs and nearly made him vomit. He heard a great crash and saw chunks fly up into the air as something tore through one of the cement buildings in front of him. Another building to his left exploded in a hail of splintered, rotting wood. He watched the soggy shreds rip through a mother’s bosom to imbed themselves in the eye socket of the tiny child she was carrying. They crumpled like paper dolls, and were crushed by the feet of those fleeing behind them.

To his right, an elderly couple was clambering out of a building just a little too slowly, as both they and the building were ripped to shreds by some monstrous force. The woman was separated at the midsection, while the man’s head was ripped clean off and skipped along the ground like a stone before colliding with a lost little boy. The boy was knocked off his feet, and he landed neatly, face-first, onto the rocky ground below. He wailed in pain, and when he got up, Akita could see his nostril had been ripped open, and blood flowed freely down his lips and into his mouth. The kid gurgled and coughed on his own blood, and attracted the attention of whatever was causing most of the destruction.

Blackness emerged from the ruins of the building; blackness granted glimmering green eyes to see and a horrendously serrated jaw to eat. But the mouth was wrong. It was a perfect circle, like a cookie cutter perverted and warped to strike fear into any who saw it. It served its purpose though. The thing lifted up the boy’s parents from the ruins of a nearby house, it embraced them in a horrific kiss and ripped out most of their torso, it consumed their hearts and lungs in one swift move, leaving a perfectly circular hole where the organs once resided. It flung the corpses to the ground and smiled at the boy before evaporating into the shadows and appearing farther away, off to destroy and consume, butcher and ruin.

The boy went to his parents. He sobbed on their lifeless forms and shook them as violently as he could, trying to wake them. They remained immobile, and thankfully lying belly down, so the child would not have to deal with the vacancy that now took up the entirety of their chests. Why did the creature not take the boy as well?

The father’s left side twitched and convulsed, violently kicking up the powdered remains of their home. He lifted his head to his son, he embraced his boy tenderly, and then he ripped out his belly with a fetid, broken hand. The mother was up and about now too, and the parents feasted on their son, consuming the flesh they had given birth to. Akita realized the other recently deceased were slowly ambling around now as well. The elderly couple, even the man, had found new life, and so had the abomination that had formed from the mother and child. They acted as one, the baby stretching its hands out, searching for food while the mother wailed and cried.

Akita watched it all, numb to life. Horrors untold revealed themselves around him, but his mind dealt with none of it. He saw everything as impassively as a judge reviewing a case. The mother and child were sentenced to death for not being able to run fast enough; the boy was put in juvenile detention for not being able to run from his cannibalistic parents; the elderly couple was sentenced to one hundred hours of community service for not demon-proofing their home. Akita’s mind was burned out on death and chaos, but his body still had an insane will to live.

He stood and began running for his life, away from the darkness that grinned, away from the flesh eating monstrosities, away from the little boy who was certainly soon to rise again. He ran alongside other living, breathing people, all of them fleeing in every direction. He saw mothers bashing in the brains of their sons trying to keep them from gnawing off their legs, but to absolutely no avail. He saw wicked versions of things that were once human walking, crawling about, sometimes nothing more than half a torso divided down the middle. He ran with the fury and ferocity of fear, lungs burning, legs slowly growing unbearably exhausted.

He reached the edge of the town along with the others, hundreds of townsfolk all herded and forced into the same tiny area. A marketplace, at one point, that now served as the personal dining area of a great dragon. Flames licked and probed the air all around the beast, they enveloped even the sturdiest buildings and reduced them to smoldering cinder. The heat and light were both piercing, Akita’s eyes throbbed while his skin burned, but he could smell all too well the familiar odor of burning flesh. He could hear human beings sizzling and breaking on the cold, unyielding ground. Just before the dragon they lay on top of each other, a sizzling orgy. He saw the dragon, great, black, and ominous, silhouetted against the flames, consuming both raw and cooked flesh by the mouthful, scooping up the terrified townsfolk in its great maw and washing them down with the charred remains of their fellows.

Akita lost his sanity then. He fell to his knees at the sight, sobbing hard against the thick air. He could not handle the memories any longer. He could not handle the existence of this thing. Meanwhile, the dragon swallowed yet another mouthful of pleading souls. It roared again, and expanded its black and considerably expansive wings, sucking in great volumes of air. Akita knew what it was planning to do, and he accepted it with the mindlessness of a compliant. The flames belched forth from the innards of the dragon and consumed the rest of the town in an atomic backwash of flame. Akita’s flesh flew off his bones like rice paper blown away in the wind, and everything turned black yet again.

A moment passed in silence. Another ambled by, and he felt sunlight on his skin. He felt his skin. He still had flesh, he still had nerves. He opened his eyes, and saw the town laid out neatly before him. He took a step back and felt the wall he had scaled so many years ago, and sunk against it. A form appeared before him. It was Zitrone, the God of the town. He was in his robes, but he did not seem the same. His appearance lacked the theatrics of the previous visitations, and from what Akita understood, the God never appeared before any less than a hundred onlookers.

“Did… did you save me?” Akita asked, surprised he had a voice.

Of course not.

“Wha… what?”

What you experienced was not real. You became trapped in the world I designed for these people, these sinners. Although I suppose it’s your own fault, you should not have stuck your little mortal nose in where it did not belong.

“WHAT!? YOU did all that to me!?”

Zitrone glared slightly, and Akita’s head exploded in pain. He let out a scream and flung himself to the ground, pounding his head off the dirt in some vain attempt to get whatever was hurting him out. Zitrone relaxed, and the pain eased slowly off. Akita righted himself, but couldn’t bring himself to meet Zitrone’s eyes again.

What I did was not meant for you, but as you have already experienced it, the damage is done. What did you think of it?

“What did I…. Are you completely fucking insane!? IT WAS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE, THAT’S WHAT I THINK!!”
Good.

Zitrone’s form melted and he shrank to little over five feet tall. A billowing, stained robe enveloped his body-- he nearly swam in the soft, brown fur. He was just a man, a man with a tiny, frail frame that needed a staff for support. A man Akita could crush with one hand tied behind his back.

I did all of this, kid. Every single hallucination, every amplified fear or desire, it’s pretty much all me. How would you like to control this kind of power?

“What? Me?”

Yeah, you’ve got the spark, I can feel it in you. I felt it in you as you were puking your guts out on the road to Zitrone. Join me, you’ve got no choice. You’ll have others like you, you’ll have a family. You’ll have me. What’ve you got to lose that I haven’t given you?

Akita glazed over the notion of being powerful and thought about the path that led him here. How he blindly stumbled along until each new obstacle presented itself and overwhelmed him. How he was a failure. He reached out and took the little man’s gaunt hand. He would learn the secrets offered and gain the power he had been searching for. He’d rip the courage from others and use it to strengthen himself. Akita would no longer be the plaything of any otherworldly force. Fear and fate would become nothing more than his tools.

“I’m yours.”

I know. You can call me Lemon, from now on. I have a feeling you’re going to like it here.