Appendix: A Cry for Help

*Dreams are a powerful thing, many who count themselves amongst the faithful claim that the gods speak to them through dreams. Some believe that when one dreams, they open themselves to a world beyond the material, but the ability to reach through this world is not one that belongs only to the divine.*

*Bric, something is tearing your body apart, and you know what it is, vengeance no matter the cost. That was the vow you made, as you knelt before the smoldering remains of your home. The howling of the hounds still echoing in your ears alongside the maniacal laughter of their cruel master. No matter the cost.*

*But what is the cost of power? The cost of strength that is so freely given? You are all too aware of the price that your body is paying, the tearing of muscle with every unnatural boon given to you, forcefully taken from those consumed by the hungering souls within the blade, the shattered parts of a greater whole that you are feeding. The price that your mind pays is a different thing entirely, it started with the buzzing, low and easy enough to ignore, but it then gave way to screaming distant at first but loud and unbearable while wielding the blade, silenced only when fed. And now you realize that you can’t recognize some of the thoughts in your own head. Especially now, as the fragments of the whole, these smaller vestiges tear at you, trying to rip you apart and take your place.*

*You can’t help but try to scream out, to beg for help, but each cry is drowned in the torrent of screaming, panicked screaming for help, for freedom. You try to think, try to find some way to escape, as the screaming vestiges inadvertently tear you apart. Where is the master of this blade? Where is Fenlaros? He responded so quickly to your challenge in Infernus? And as another part of you is dragged screaming away, you slowly begin to realize something, once more those alien thoughts fill your mind. Was it pride? Was it something so simple that drove him to answer your challenge? And was it also pride that now drew his attention from the being that he had chosen to leech from?*

*In a flash you see a coastline, made of jagged rock encrusted in salt, along which you see a house perched atop a hill and beyond that a lighthouse precariously placed along the edges of a cliff beneath which crash waves of saltwater and slime, carrying with them the bodies of horrors from the deep. In the heart of a great storm, you watch as massive creatures in the shape of coiled shells with tentacles dangling from their base, battle hordes of grotesque monstrosities. The sounds of distant cannons and monstrous screeches are occasionally drowned out by the boom of thunder as the strike of lightning illuminates the horizon, illuminates the countless forms approaching the coast. Below, as the sea threatens to consume the coastline, monsters crowd along a stone causeway at the edge of which sits a seastone chair, before which you see a stairway leading into the depths.*

*Pride, or perhaps desperation in the face of this assault, a distraction, a single crack in its cage, just wide enough for it to reach out, as it had tried so many times before. And the first thing it finds is you. The weakest link in the parasite’s chain. You find yourself collapsing beneath the weight of this creature’s presence.*

*You desperately try to resist, like a cornered animal, you lash outwards in a vain attempt to survive what’s coming. You scatter, amidst the torrent of screaming souls, beneath the boundless weight of the minds that make up this singular whole. Your voice is drowned beneath the singular scream of the many, a single cry that echoes forth beyond the confines of this entity’s prison, using your mind as an anchor to do so. A single cry for help that echoes throughout the material plane, and shatters the barriers between worlds, waking both the living and the dead, both mortal and divine. Just as the fading cry rings out into the void, the entity is once more pulled back through the cracks, back into its prison. And your mind reforms within the torrent of voices now as scarred as your body.*