Foribus Mentis Saga 2 (Eng)

**Foribus Mentis 2: Mental Chains**  is the second saga of the Foribus Mentis webcomic, introducing new characters and a new story unrelated to the previous one. However, both happen in the same universe and period.

## Otros atributos

### No one is welcome in New Greeenville

On a cloudy day, one of the clouds appears to give birth to a humanoid angel-like creature that lands in a wooded area near a town called New Greenville. After the rough landing and regaining consciousness, this angel slowly crawls into some bushes and changes its form completely to that of a strange animal. The angel now transformed into some kind of unidentified mammal begins to feed on other animals to regain its energy. Meanwhile, a military base near the landing site notices the appearance of a strange object that has fallen nearby, so a group of armed soldiers head to the site to investigate what happened. Upon arrival, the angel seems to have regained its strength and resumes its initial form to fly away, however, one of the soldiers manages to shoot it when the creature was already at altitude and falls again abruptly. The angel does not manage to survive and dies while its body dissects, expelling steam.

Nearby, a man with long hair and an eye patch saw everything that happened from the shadows and tries to take a part of the already deceased angel. To his bad luck, the man does not succeed due to the weight of the creature so he only cuts off a piece of skin before escaping from the soldiers' sight.

Subsequently, we are introduced to the main character, Threvor Ryland, a 26-year-old man who lives in the small town of New Greenville, located somewhere in Tennessee, United States. Threvor was walking towards the outskirts of the town when he discovers a creature with a terrifying appearance a few meters away from him, but it quickly moves away and the young man chases it. Then, the tranquility of the town is interrupted by armed soldiers wearing gas masks who have orders to set up a scientific research base with the local people and animals because of the anomalies that are occurring in the world.

One of the soldiers tells Ryland that it is not the first time that the government performs experiments on humans using people in villages far from big cities or important tourist spots so as not to attract too much attention from intruders.

When Ryland thought he was about to die at the hands of the soldiers, a portal manifests itself that gives him the ability to handle a certain type of electricity with which he easily gets rid of the soldiers leaving them unconscious and taking the opportunity to flee and try to save the strange creature from the soldiers but he does not succeed and the creature vanishes before his eyes emitting screams leaving the protagonist confused and dazed.

Before leaving town, Ryland meets Marina, a short girl, and Trent Hira, a punk who lives near the dump and wants (at first) to overthrow the government.

Hira tells Ryland that a well-known band is playing at a pub in town and convinces him to attend. Hira tells Ryland that one of the things he enjoys the most is to mosh at concerts because it allows him to release the pent-up energy of frustrations and anger, as if it were a catharsis. Ryland understands this and plays along, so they both start pushing and hitting each other in the middle of the audience. As the concert goes on and the group of people gets bigger and bigger, Ryland begins to feel how his anger has begun to subside as he throws and receives blows between the group.

### Ritual

Ryland and Hira escape from the military through the forest and after walking for a while, they see a group of hooded robed men performing some sort of ritual. While hiding in the bushes, something goes wrong with the ritual and a creature, appearing from symbols on the ground, attacks the summoners. After killing them, Ryland and Hira try to flee but the creature notices them and also attacks them, wounding Ryland and leaving him unconscious, so Hira has to defeat it with the only weapons she has, the chains.

On the other hand, an Austrian woman who suffers from sleep disorders called Agneth is searching, together with her brother, for more information about the portals and the union of both worlds by inducing that the control of these could help her to eliminate the materialization of her uncontrollable nightmares.

### King of the Kill

Meanwhile, a farmer who is working in his orchard is questioned by a police officer, as they have received several calls from local residents about disappearances and outsiders hanging around. The farmer assures him that he has seen nothing and returns to his hut, but the policeman insists on going in to check and ask questions. The farmer finally agrees and begins to answer, then, another farmer at the back of the orchard buries what appears to be a corpse of a person in a lot where there are other bodies buried with hands sticking out of the ground. They talk about the importance of not forgetting to crush the "fertilizer" until it is well ground, so he begins to beat the bodies into the ground with a shovel. Finally the farmers kill the policemen and use them as fertilizer for their garden. The earth begins to suck up the bodies until they disappear completely.

Hira never loved his father because he abandoned him with his mother when he was a child, but he never knew that, without telling him, his father took care of him without him seeing him because he never had the courage to go back to them. He died in a car accident when he had decided to return to them and try to live together as a family, saying before he died that he regretted not having been a better father and that he only hoped that his son would live a happy and free life.

Later in the series, there is mention of a childhood trauma the brothers suffered as children when they witnessed a corpse that their uncle had hidden in a part of the barn near the house in the country where they lived, which may have been the main trigger for the nightmares.

That is why Agneth decides to go to the United States to buy one of those crops from the farmer, since in her desperation to eliminate her nightmares she tries to consume the supposedly curative properties of them, after having tried therapies and medicines that did not work.

Later, Ryland discovers that his father had been sent to jail for working with the farmer and not only for the murder of those children, as they were also used as fertilizer. This allowed him to generate more income for his family years earlier.

### Nightday

While Ryland and Hira were going into the rural areas of Tennessee, after the snowfall, they come across a small dog that seemed very happy to find humans, they stay a while watching him while he chases his own tail as they find it funny, suddenly, the canine seems to be terrified by something he sees in the sky and runs away to the opposite side from where he came from. Then, Ryland notices that up ahead, an area of the forest is covered under total darkness while the other part is in daylight. This immediately puts them on alert and Hira directs his gaze towards the sky, where he spots a strange formation near the sun that could be creating this eclipse. This formation is shaped like bars that seem to be "imprisoning" the sun, which immediately alarms the boys. Suddenly, the dark part begins to affect the plants and some animals that were around leaving them unconscious, Hira and Ryland begin to run to avoid being hit by the part without light that turns out to be an entity originated by the anomaly. In the central part of town, Marina was on her way to drink a coffee. She seems not to have noticed that part of the town is dark and the other half keeps the sunlight. She also doesn't see that her shadow seems to come to life and tries to detach itself from the ground to try to get closer to her, but Marina senses that something bad is about to happen and turns her head back. As she does this, there seems to be no trace of the anomaly happening behind her, as the shadow had returned to its normal form before Marina noticed it. Despite this, she does notice that there is something strange still going on and watches as some shadows of some pedestrians, who were also on the spot, begin to attack the people who were directly underneath the sun. Marina watches in horror as the shadows seem to pull and drag their owners towards themselves, as if they were some kind of portal to another world, tearing chunks of skin off their faces as they trap them. She too is almost trapped by her own shadow but manages to enter the roofed room amidst the chaos and desperation of the other people. Marina's shadow finally decides to attack her and she tries to climb into a cooler inside the store. She quickly realizes that being in a place with a roof, where the sun does not project directly, will not do her any good, since it seems that shadows can maintain their appearance regardless of the volume or distance of a body in relation to the sun.

Ryland questions how there could be an entity made of shadow under the sun if there is nothing to produce it, but later realizes that it was created by small fragments of solid black material that were bound together. The bars surrounding the sun seemed to absorb the sunlight and this, when emitted through the dark bars, released these fragments. In this way, the entity could create more shadow entities as the eclipse increased in size. The entity begins to control the shadows of the boys and they begin to pull the legs of both of them, while taking advantage of the fact that they were temporarily blinded. The shadows managed to drag them towards themselves and adopted their figures when the boys were inside them. For a few moments, the shadows advance a few meters through the dark part but they stop and start to feel pain. Hira manages to stick his face out trying to get out but the shadow tries to suck him back in.

Finally, after managing to be expelled from the shadows, the shadows are still cast by their bodies, no matter which direction they are facing in relation to the position of the sun, so running away is no good. Ryland and Hira remember the little dog chasing its tail that they saw hours before and try to put one last plan into action. They decide that the only way to defeat the entity is to make it chase its own shadow so that it will either extinguish itself or be trapped in some sort of infinite loop from which it can't get out. Once the goal is achieved, they watch as the object in the sky that caused the eclipse begins to mysteriously disintegrate.

### Nightmares

Agneth gets the fruit generated by the Pheratierra and takes a bite. But this fruit contained the grudges of hundreds of people who had died in the past. These were preserved by the roots of the plants found in the farmers' crops. This has a catastrophic effect on Agneth, who begins to suffer the fusion of the enormous grudge stored in the fruit and the entities that cause his nightmares.

With this, it is shown that the fruits, besides not having any visible difference to detect if they have grudge or goodness stored, can store the feelings of one or several people in one fruit. Agneth is trapped in a mental energy quasar and the people around her begin to be absorbed in their own nightmares. Later, these begin to mix and people begin to become victims of other people's nightmares.

Humanity is left in a state of sleep-like suspension but with their eyes open, so people are said to be in a state of "waking sleep" as the nightmare waves creep into their minds. Humanity begins to feel the pain and mental torture of Agneth with no escape from this new state. The entities realize that it is a bad idea to kill the humans, they discover that they can use their mental energy as a renewable and inexhaustible food source. A kind of quasar begins to form from this energy thanks to the action of the entities who, finally, managed to enter our dimension. Agneth is trapped in this quasar while in a dream state, indicating that she is the main source of energy. A giant eye-shaped entity watches closely and closely over a motionless citizen paralyzed with fear. This monster begins to amplify the nightmarish waves of the quasar and these are seen to enter the brain of the man in front of the creature. In the sky, the energies of humans (represented as a spiritual version of the physical body or soul) seem to float absorbed in colossal amounts all over the world. In addition, all the deceased buried in areas of Feratierras who died holding a grudge, seem to have been resurrected in essence form as parts of the entities that entered the Earth.

During these nightmare expansions of Agneth, Hira wakes up in an office unfamiliar to him. He notices that he is wearing an elegant suit and reads a nameplate on the desk and realizes that he is now president of an important multinational company. Hira begins to feel horrified and confused, then, a woman dressed as a secretary enters his office and tells him that his shares have quadrupled his fortune, she also tells him that his company has successfully managed to get rid of all those poor people who lived on the east side of the city in order to build a new shopping mall. This horrifies Hira even more as the secretary starts throwing money in the air.

Meanwhile, Ryland, being hit by the waves of nightmares, gets to see Agneth's desires to finally be able to sleep in peace, which leads him to understand her motivations as she experiences the same suffering and exhaustion. He realizes that she too longs for "freedom" but in a different sense than the one he seeks. To finally be free of her torments.