Ori turned Crucible’s words over, weighing how they made him feel. Resisting the idea of intrinsic limits had come to him by instinct. The notion that anyone could be predicted and neatly categorised clashed with his belief that, given the chance, anyone could become anything.

  And yet, too much of what the artefact spirit said rang true.

  Not the broad generalities, but the parts that touched upon his own path. As Crucible spoke, Ori’s subtly sharpening mind caught upon something new, a faint sense of power he’d never noticed before, as if listening itself had become a kind of perception. With it came a clearer understanding: the real limit wasn’t capability, but desire.

  To become strong, you needed desire. Strength you didn’t want was something forced upon you, something that changed you against your will. Ori didn’t take words on faith, but Crucible had an uncanny ability to read him plainly and project meaning in a way even he could grasp.

  It had taken only minutes of incomprehensible technobabble to convince him that Crucible was an impossibly complex machine, governed by a magical mind that had spent hundreds of thousands of years improving itself and others. He still wouldn’t follow anyone blindly, especially advice laced with mind-altering magic, but he had no issue listening, testing, and keeping what worked.

  In that spirit, Ori now wandered the arid plains on his sixth attempt at the trial. On his own, alone again, the sudden abundance of thoughts became oppressive. The environment didn’t help. The landscape was bleached white, as if the colour had been baked out of stone and dirt. He had dreamt of something like this happening to the ground below when he’d played snooker with suns.

  It felt like the realm itself was accusing him, as if he’d drained it dry. Seeing it from above had been one thing. Walking it, step by step, across endless waste, was another. Worse, unlike his astral self that had floated over the land and called storms like some petty god, he was back to being normal.

  Mortal.

  Weak.

  He’d tried everything, sleeping, clenching his fists and willing something to happen, Freya’s knowledge, and even shouting random words. When none of it worked, he walked in search of water. By the fourth day, his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth, his throat itched, and thirst gnawed at the edges of his focus, until nausea and dizziness set in. With no landmarks, no life, and no water in any direction, he sat and forced himself to think.

  He returned, again and again, to Crucible’s comments on his limits. The claim that he’d never rule or never be good at lying didn’t bother him. Neither did talk of harbouring darkness and light.

  What he couldn’t let go of was the thing he’d never been able to afford to lie to himself about. He couldn’t hide behind the comforting fiction that he was normal when he wasn’t. He’d pushed it down, refused to let it define him, but it was still there, the core of it. The thing that made him, if not unique, then different.

  He’d been abandoned time and time again, left to witness everyday depravity and cruelty. He’d endured abuse and violence at the hands of people who should have been his protectors. He’d believed he’d grown up and moved past his childhood, only to be abducted and abused once more. Yet that abandonment still lingered, a soul-deep black hole in his chest that followed him even as he sought the light, a shadow that drove him to seek out nightmares of his own design amid the tranquillity of dreams.

  Whether it was the trial’s magic or his half-delirious state, the void lay before him. A portal that warped the ground itself, funnelling reality and fate towards it. Its centre was a calm, featureless disk of darkness. One that was silent, patient and for Ori, impossible to ignore.

  Ori stared at it, holding onto the idea that when he changed himself according to his own desires, the trial responded.

  And so he leaned in as he widened his perspective. If this realm held concealed spaces, regions he couldn’t reach because of what he thought he was, then he’d need to change himself, and the first step in doing so, Ori decided, was to understand and accept his flaws instead of rejecting them.

  An old memory surfaced, Bruce Wayne, surrounded by bats, overwhelmed, then standing and opening himself to fear. The image clicked into place with a sharp clarity, echoing the lesson of the first trial. Ori exhaled, leaned over the abyss, reached into the dark, and screamed.

  Had his awareness remained intact, he would have felt himself tearing as he fell through primordial darkness. Sparks of chaos, shards of liquid light, fractured atoms of time. Geometries and colours that dismantled reason as they passed through him, stripping him down to the raw, ceaseless Id at his core.

  The maelstrom persisted, hostile to the very ideas of length or volume, past or future, life or death. He became it as the Id endured, changed yet unbroken, like a child screaming into a storm, ground down and strengthened by the same forces that tried to erase it.

  And then the Id remembered its desire to become someone new.

  Someone powerful.

  And so it did.

  In a place beyond time, countless eternities passed within instants as the entity that was, and would one day call itself Ori Suba, rebuilt itself within the void. There was no anatomical knowledge behind it, only a soul-deep certainty that it was human, and the patience of endless trial and error.

  Even there, silver specks of Quintessence glimmered and called to it, offering transformation, while Aether, the raw primordial force behind all change and energy, scoured it like sand. Under the pressure of the howling abyss, its as-yet inaccessible characteristics unified, drawn together by the sheer weight of catalysts he’d accrued so far. It's Will, the aspect Freya had claimed was special, fused with Spirit into Intent. Its Presence, still intangible, fused with its Perception into Aura. And then, driven by the overwhelming abundance of unactivated catalysts within, Aura fused with Intent into Domain.

  It became he once more, as particle by particle, stolen from the trial’s abyssal wind, he rebuilt not a physical body, because such a thing had no meaning here, but an astral form. Porous and superconductive, diamond-hard against an uncertain future.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Crucible was right, Ori would not become the void, but he had no issue using it as fuel.

  He forced his unknown affinities to be refined, fusing and transforming with the sparks of Quintessence and Aether, into something new.

  It could have stripped him clean, left behind an unblemished, man-shaped crystal automaton. Instead, he kept the flaws. He kept the part that had once been called humanity. The power he sought arrived in increments as he was remade. Less dramatic than the shifts in mind and spirit, but real, as he seized more matter from the abyss.

  He continued until he resembled a mountain given human form, dense with substance, heavy with potential.

  Then the void tore him apart again. The gales and howls stripped away his new flesh faster than he could rebuild it.

  As the endlessness stretched on, the focus sustaining his will began to run dry. He understood, with a cold certainty, that despite the trial’s mechanics, a true final oblivion awaited him if he failed here, and so he changed his approach. Instead of clinging to solidity, he allowed himself to be carried away and scattered, spending his effort on maintaining contact with the fragments being torn away. The image of Batman surrendering to fear returned, brighter this time.

  Here were the nightmares his mastery of dreams had kept at bay. If he was to avoid oblivion, he had to stop hiding from himself. So he faced them, unfiltered.

  A claustrophobia triggered by a Halloween mask, stuck and tangled in his hair, turning breathing into panic, sweat soaking his shirt as fear drowned sense. Heart and breath spiralling into hyperventilation as his vision narrowed.

  Being stabbed. Blood soaking his tracksuit. Blood slicking his phone as he called nine-nine-nine from a bus stop, rage at betrayal by people who called him bruv. The dull, crushing sadness of dying alone after living a life that felt like it meant nothing.

  The first beings he’d killed. Their demonic bodies bloated and grotesque, salt-and-pepper filaments decomposing flesh in real time. The horror of what he’d done landing in his gut as the blood-covered shiv slipped from his fingers, fungus blooming from his hands, spores burrowing into skin. His scream as flesh peeled, discoloured, filled with pus, and parasites ate him from within.

  A scuffle outside a nightclub, typical argy-bargy with lads trying to start something. Alone, he might have de-escalated it with bruises and a dented ego. But Diane screamed, he told her to run, she didn’t. “Shut dat bitch up before she calls the feds,” someone said, and then he was pinned and stomped, a boot on the back of his neck.

  A procession of other catastrophes followed, too many to count. Some had even happened, others' fears he had hardened himself against. Then came quieter torments. The fear that anyone who’d treated him well had done it out of pity. That he had nothing worth offering. That there was something missing within him that others had, something that meant he’d never find love, never build a family, never understand happiness the way they did.

  For most of his life, he’d buried that fear under independence and the illusion of growth. If he were alone forever, so be it.

  After the pandemic, loneliness had become normal. He wasn’t outgoing to begin with. Maybe he preferred solitude. Why want what was out of reach? Why desire what he was clearly unsuited for?

  “Hmmm? This is certainly a surprise,” said a sweet, refined voice Ori could never forget.

  “Mel?” he said, and he was back on the streets of Peckham, the same drizzle-soaked evening from which he’d been abducted.

  “Is this your doing, my light?” Mel asked, wonder in her tone as she walked the street as if it were unfamiliar. “This is your dreamcrafting, isn’t it? And you’ve pulled me in here. Who have I caught, Ori? Or are you even still where I left you?” There was no anger or reproach, instead she seemed delighted, almost proud.

  “This is really you, isn’t it?” he asked. “I’m not just dreaming you up, am I?”

  “I could ask the same.” She came closer, ruby eyes bright under streetlights, and her hand slid down his arm. He remembered that nightmare, the helplessness, the way she’d treated him like a chew toy, but he didn’t flinch or look away. “Except you feel different… Oh, I know.” Her eyes sharpened with realisation. “You escaped and went into the Crucible, didn’t you?” She smiled wider as Ori felt a cold thread of worry at the idea that his location might no longer be hidden.

  “Don’t worry. It’ll be our little secret. I’m curious how far along the Path you’ll go. I noticed even then, I wondered what would happen if I took you and kept you. Could you truly dispose of that worthless infernal who’d come at me through you? Would you escape? Or would you twist fate into taking me with you?” Her smile was wistful and sardonic in equal measure.

  His old anger at being assaulted and abducted had twisted into confusion at the sight of her. “You said you needed my soul. You want to feed off me, don’t you? You don’t actually want me, do you? Do you even know how to want someone?”

  Mel smiled as if each barb slid off her. “I’m willing to find out.” The earnestness of the challenge caught him off guard as she stepped closer, arms around his shoulders, lips brushing the side of his neck. For now, he let her.

  “Let me tell you a secret,” she whispered. “In here, you could do anything you wanted to me. Touch me wherever you wanted, fuck me however you wanted. You could make me yours. I’d be powerless. Nothing could stop you from punishing me like the bad little demon that I…”

  Ori stepped back, sighing, and watched her freeze mid-performance—a perfect statue of seduction. With what he now understood, the idea of her being powerless, even in a realm shaped by his will, rang false. Everyone had blind spots. Everyone had vulnerabilities, the kind that could be exploited like a Trojan horse. Realising how much he longed to be desired hit harder than it should have. But once a secret surfaced after being buried that long, ignoring the vulnerability could only rot you from the inside.

  “See you around, Mel,” he said, waving. She vanished. And as the dream faded, he was oddly sure he’d see her again.

  With each nightmare and each truth dragged into the open, Ori absorbed more of the void. He began to understand its capacity for self-deception, its talent for fear and doubt. Yet there was an honesty in it he could finally accept. He was still human, still a tangle of virtues and vices, still a material being, where power came from transitions: heat and cold, light and dark. Light and creation could reshape him, but he needed a destructive balance too, a counterpoint found only in the abyss. Even knowing that, he understood it was only the beginning.

  His mountainous form coalesced, then condensed. Flaws ran through him like deep fissures beneath darkened flesh, while light scattered across his skin like glistening freckles. His eyes, once brown, now shone silver, a corona of light at the rim of his irises.

  To Ori, magic meant power, and so anything even loosely tied to it was snatched from the void and compressed into him, into spirit and mind, bone and organ and flesh, heedless of the risks Freya’s rote knowledge implied. Even his familiar bond, that intangible fabric between souls, was reinforced and intensified in ways that baffled them both. Despite the distance and the barrier of dreams, the sprite worked with him to strengthen it.

  His grasp of the void, an affinity for the infinite expanse of shadow and nightmare, merged with and reshaped his power over dreams. Through it, he could almost feel his other affinities sharpening, hardening, and becoming whole.

  When it was done, Ori found himself back on the surface of the bleached world, kneeling by the lip that led into the abyss. As he sat there, whole again, and a calm settled over him with the certainty that he’d done everything he could think of to grow.

  Satisfied and with a new confidence born from being remade, Ori left the trial for the sixth time.