“Traitorous Mage!” the Whispers roared from behind me.

  It was pretty clear that the murderous asshole couldn’t hurt me as I reached for another pink—I cried out in pain as something pierced my chest. I looked down to see a shadowy hand sticking out to the left of my sternum.

  “You will do as you are told, else I will force you to before discarding your backstabbing corpse,” the Whispers growled in my ear.

  I almost couldn’t breathe, but I had to keep going. My fingers closed on the pink crystal and moved it to a red socket. Coughing and wheezing, I reached for another.

  “Why don’t you listen, you pitiful excuse for a Mage? Don’t you want the power I’m offering you? The chance to hold countries in your grip? With me, you could challenge the very Gods and tear them down to weep and beg at your feet!”

  Blackness crept into the edge of my vision. Yet I kept going, moving the pinks to the red zone. Until there was only one. It was all I could see, and I was struck again with how odd it was to be there. Was there a reason or a connection that I didn’t understand? What did it symbolize? It had to mean something. I struggled to take in just a single mouthful of air into my lungs, but the pressure was just too great in my lungs.

  Something was filling them. Am I drowning? I clutched at the final pink, failing to pull it free. I tried again and again, and with a click, it clattered between two other crystals. If I could have sworn at that moment, I would have. I pushed it along as I felt myself about to pass out. Socket. I have to get it into the socket.

  Tipping it into what I hoped was a red hole, I heard the click.

  “No!” howled the shadowy Whispers. “You foolish little creature! I will crush you for this!”

  The pressure was gone! I breathed in the sweet air as my lungs suddenly worked. “Why… why don’t you go fuck yourself?” I said. I looked down, and to my astonishment, the shadowy hand was still there. “You can’t hurt me. The pink… the pink gave you power to hurt me, didn’t it?”

  He pulled his hand out as I turned around to grin at him triumphantly. He took three steps back. “You cannot even fathom my power!”

  “Do you know you sound like a cheap villain? Fathom your power… just shut up and let me finish what I am doing,” I said. When he didn’t say anything further, I turned back around and studied the crystals. The brown ones were scattered between all three zones, so there wasn’t anything that should have been a clue, like there being no pinks in the red until I placed one there.

  I grabbed one of the brown crystals and pulled it out of its socket. Again, I immediately felt ill and felt the need to put it back. There was a tingling in my fingers that caught my attention. That’s new, I thought, worried.

  Putting out of my mind, I contemplated the offending crystal, ignoring the increasingly insistent need to put it back as it started to fade. The Whispers had returned to the other side of the plinth and stroked his beard, watching me. My fingers continued to tingle and the pins-and-needles sensation slowly crept into my hand.

  “The demon failed with you, didn’t it?” the old man postulated. “You’re not actually corrupted.”

  “Nope. The bastard even pretended to be my friend,” I replied. There was a ribbon of bitterness in my tone, which was not lost on the being made of shadows. My hand started shaking, and I almost dropped the crystal as the brown faded away. The tingling subsided, and I inserted the blank crystal into a yellow socket to be sure.

  To my relief, the crystal was flooded with yellow light.

  The Whispers coughed a few times. “If you continue to do that, I’ll die,” he said softly. “Are you a murderer, Mage? Do you enjoy causing suffering in others?”

  I stopped reaching for the next brown crystal and shook my head without looking up. “No,” I said. “I really don’t. Sometimes, I don’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” the apparition said wryly. “Even when everything looks black and white, there’s another path to follow. A better path.”

  My anger rose with my eyes as I raised them to look at the being who had decided to wipe out most of the life on this planet. “Is that how you justify massacring millions of sapient and non-sapient beings? And the slaying of possibly billions after getting out of here?”

  “Population growth needs to be managed, else it explodes exponentially,” he replied sadly. “Then there is resource scarcity, leading to suffering, starvation, and painful death! I’m only trying to prevent that, to reduce the harm.”

  There it was, I thought. The justification of tyrannical benevolence. This was dangerous reasoning, the kind of thinking that led to justifying any injustice, any abuse, any holocaust. His conviction was so ingrained that there was no turning back. I reached for the next brown crystal.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Back on Earth, there have been many people who thought along those lines. And every time they rise into power, things never go well for them or the people they think they are protecting. So much so that those people rise up against them when they realize what kind of monster they put in charge, or the other countries of the world step in because such tyrants are never satisfied with their little fiefdoms.”

  The tingling in my fingers moved faster this time, making it all the way to my wrist before the crystal was clear. I socketed it back into its blue socket and pulled another brown crystal.

  “So you think I am a petty despot, drunk on power?” he said before succumbing to a fit of coughing.

  “No, you’re worse, in a way. Despots crave power. I think you chose this path again and again. I suspect you started out with excellent intentions, but now have embraced this to the point where you’re no better than a tinpot dictator.”

  As I talked, the tingling moved up to my elbow, and I could no longer feel my fingers. I fumbled the empty crystal into a socket, but my fingers provided no sensation. I looked at them, blackening before my very eyes.

  “There’s a price,” the Whispers said between hacking coughs. “A price to pay for cleansing this final color. My parting gift. Your body will rot and bits will fall off. Unless…”

  I watched as the shadowy figure coughed and wheezed, holding on to the plinth for dear life. I had a moment of pity for the being, which was drowned out by the horror of what was happening to the fingers of my right hand. It sounded like leprosy to me, and though it was curable back on Earth, I didn’t know if it was here. Especially if it is magical on more than a God level.

  “Unless what, asshole?” I asked, getting angry again.

  “Unless you help me,” he replied.

  For a moment, I considered it. I really did. And it made me feel dirty, ashamed that it was even an option to me. There was no way that I could have unleashed such a monster on this world. Likely all my friends, all my enemies, and so many innocents would die horribly. And if, for some reason, the Whispers deigned to spare my friends, could I look them in the eyes? Would they not turn on me? I would welcome death if it came to that.

  Using my left hand, I pulled the last four and placed them in my right hand. The tingling went all the way up my arm and started spreading throughout my body.

  “You know, for a second or two there, I actually considered helping you. I don’t want to lose parts of my body, but I’d rather be a leper than allow you to murder my friends and everyone else. The Voice is an asshole, but at least he’s not a manipulative, power-mad, fascist fuck like you!”

  The Whispers’s eyes widened, and as I struggled to hold on to the crystals fading in my right hand, I watched him as he tried and failed to speak. Instead, he coughed and retched as what might have been his blood leaked from his eyes and vomited from his mouth. He leaned against the plinth for a couple of breaths before collapsing into dust.

  I carefully socket the four crystals, as I couldn’t feel anything. It was clumsy and took too long. Then I stood there, waiting for the Voice to tell me the quest was complete and give me enchanted novelty glasses or something stupid like that. Nothing happened.

  “Okay, Voice,” I said to the surrounding air. “This numb bullshit is not what I signed up for. I killed your evil twin and got all the crystals back to normal. Can we be down with this so I can see about being healed? Hello?”

  As usual, there was no answer. Yet the very air of the cave suddenly felt heavy with waiting. For what, I didn’t know. It wasn’t like I hadn’t—

  “Oh, fuck me sideways,” I whispered and groaned at my blindness. “I still have to figure out the puzzle.” I stared at the board, visualizing the different primary color bands—and realized how unbalanced it was. There were too many reds and yellows, and not enough secondary colors of purple, orange, or green!

  The seven blues seemed like a good amount. The reds, though, could definitely be reduced. But by how many? Taking my time since I couldn’t feel a damned thing, I moved two of the reds to yellow, turning them orange. Then I moved three of the reds to the blue band, making three more purple.

  But what about green crystals? It seemed important to find a better balance, and looking it over, I had fifteen crystals in the yellow band, but only eleven each in the blue and red bands. I needed green, but not in the yellow band, so I began the laborious process of moving four of the twelve yellow crystals to the blue band, raising the number of crystals there to fifteen and bringing the primary colors almost into a balance and adding four green.

  “Still too much red,” I muttered. I had to find the balance. I carefully picked up one red crystal and looked at it, thinking. When the red light in the crystal began to fade, I started to put it back… but then I stopped. “Why not let it become clear?”

  It was one of those simple things I had tabled as a ‘don’t let the colors fade away’ kind of thing, but it was just part of the puzzle mechanics. I grinned and socketed it first in the blue, then moved it to the yellow. I just moved another red directly to the yellow band, and voila, one more green, one more orange, and the primary colors were way more in sync! With a smile, I looked over the bands and realized I had made a mistake.

  “Oh, no,” I groaned. “Now there’s too many in the blue band and not enough in the red!”

  Picking up a purple from the blue band, I socketed in the red, hoping it wouldn’t change. I was relieved when it didn’t so I moved another. Looking over my work, I felt pretty good. But I decided to take it a step further and move one more crystal from the blue to the red band—and balance out the secondary colors a little closer.

  I took a purple from the blue band and reset it before moving it to the yellow band to charge it and then to the red band. Now it all seemed as balanced as possible.

  Primary colors: Red 8, Blue 7, Yellow 7

  Secondary colors: Orange 5, Green 5, Purple 4

  Bands: Red 12, Blue 12, Yellow 13

  The whole thing started flashing, faster and brighter, and I covered my eyes with my hands. Soon, it was painfully bright, and I cried out in pain trying to look away. The light faded, and I peeked through my fingertips at the crystals. Now the light filling them was white, and too much to look directly at, even though the intensity had gone down. My eyes watered, and I knelt down, waiting for something from the Voice, telling me that this trial was over.

  I felt a presence behind me. It was not threatening or hungry. It just… was. I waited, my body numb except for my burning eyes.

  “Finn the Mage. I believe I have misjudged you, and for that I am sorry.”

  until I do. We good? Good.