The wolf came back about ten minutes later, dragging it’s useless bottom half along with it and basically begging for Elach to kill it. When it went in for a weak nibble Elach gripped it’s jaw and pulled, the entire head popping off like some kind of children’s doll as its newly headless body slumped to the ground. Elach stared into where the wolf’s eyes would have been if it’s face hadn’t been a featureless mask before he started wiping off the goop, revealing a steel skull and lower jaw that he could definitely find a use for. He then started cleaning the rest of the skeleton off, but not before seeing if he could bend the ribs without breaking them. He put too much strength into the first one and it snapped clean off, and Elach muttered a curse to himself as he gingerly worked on the others. It took a while, but when he was finished he had a set of ribs pushed together to create a makeshift steel shield with the broken pair bent upwards as a handle.

He took two of the unbroken leg bones to use as clubs and pushed the rest of them to the corner of the circle so he could finish off the pattern. Nothing else attacked him while he put the last six cubes in place, but he caught glimpses of two other red forms in the void. And just before he put the last one in place, he saw a blue shadow crawling out from the wall. But this one stuck to the walls, patrolling around the perimeter of the room as if it was watching. And waiting. Elach shuddered at the thought of what could be behind the shadow as he placed the last cube on it’s match, picking up one of the few remaining light cubes to start looking for the last circle. He’d completely forgotten to use up the last bits of light from the cubes he’d used to finish off the third pattern, so he was starting from nothing.

Elach wandered in the void, giving the coloured shadows as wide of a berth as he could as he did. As the number of his cubes dipped from four to three, Elach sped up. When it dropped to two, Elach started sprinting. And when he got to his final cube, Elach no longer cared about the shadows in the void. He ran at full tilt, metal shrieking and goop sloshing to get out of his way as he careened around the room with his head on a swivel, the nothing around him growing more and more all encompassing as the lines on his cube shriveled up and cracked with the death of their light.

Elach barely registered when he ran over the last symbol. It was nothing like the others; a simplified version of Resthollow’s symbol with the walls and rib cage still discernible, but more akin to a caricature instead of the real thing. Elach dumped out his carrying shirt onto the symbol and scrambled to find a cube that fit, but a blue shadow rammed into his center before he could get through a fifth of them. The cube fell out of his hand and onto the circle as the void consumed him, and with a bellow of fear and rage Elach reached down to what felt like the creature’s head and pushed. Steel splintered and dug into his fingers as the weight of whatever was on top of him stopped trying to rip his guts out, and Elach rolled out from under the corpse as he readied his shield and makeshift club to try and get back to the circle.

Something slashed the back of his knee, and Elach retaliated by screaming in pain and collapsing. He smeared some of the blue thing’s goop over the wound and pushed himself up as an army of invisible Issi mimics ripped at him, his shield blocking a few that would have gone to his neck and his club crushing through them as though they were mere air resistance. Eventually the wounds became a single entity, a burning that engulfed Elach as he pushed through to the tiny beacon of hope that was his last cube. At one point he stopped remembering anything but repeated snaps that blasted through his brain like localized thunderclaps, and then he was kneeling over a lit circle with his own blood marring the perfect steel surface as it dripped down in steady streams. A reminder that he was alive. He’d dragged a headless mimic corpse in here with him to use for it’s goop, and by the time all of the burning was gone there wasn’t an inch of his body that was normal. Everything was hurt, but he couldn’t feel it. As he sat there taking in wracking breaths Elach looked down at his little pile of cubes. This was Resthollow’s trial. They’d put him through this to… prove his worth. What kind of work would he be doing for them if this was what the trial was like? None of the wisps killed their prospective vessels if they weren’t strong enough, or what they were looking for. What was the point of bonding Resthollow if….

Snap.

Elach looked down at his little pile of cubes, his breath steady and his mind clear. He needed to get this done if he was going to bond with Resthollow. He felt like he was just doing something else, but that didn’t matter now. He needed to get this done. He picked up the pieces one by one and spun them into their correct orientation, simpler now thanks to Resthollow’s symbol having multiple different parts he could focus on. He needed to get this done. Elach put the tenth piece in as he saw a green shadow join the five red and two blue shadows, absentmindedly noting that the third pillar was a deep forest green through the void. He needed to get this done. He placed the second from last piece in and held the last piece in his hand. He needed to get this done. He held the last piece to the symbol, which started shining a dark yellow and raising into the air with him on it. He needed to get this done. Wait, had he done it?

He needed to live.

Elach looked around in a panic as the void crept in on him from all sides, the symbol trading it’s light for the yellow glow as it raised him to the roof. This one was growing much slower than the others, and Elach crawled to the edge of the dim glow to feel blindly over the edge for anything that had hitched a ride up with him. But all the shadows seemed to be staying put; mulling around the bottom of the pillar like a bunch of predators with cornered prey. They were waiting for him to give up and die.

Elach raised his hand to the sky to feel for when the pillar got too close to the roof, trying to delay the inevitable jump until the absolute last moment. He felt nothing for close to a minute, but then his hand brushed against something rough and pointy. Then his elbow started to bend. His time was up. Elach did one last scan of the room as he dangled the lower half of his body off the pillar, his eyes locking onto something that he hadn’t been able to see from down on the ground. The three shadowed pillars were casting shadows of their own, spinning off in all directions and crossing over each other at random points. There were two places where all three of the shadows converged, and Elach looked up at the empty roof where he knew there was a yellow crystal waiting to be crushed and give this pillar it’s own shadows. And one of those shadows would fall on one of the two places. He was quite high up, but maybe if he crashed down on one of the mimics he could survive the fall. There was no way to know which one was right. So he chose the one that felt right; the one closest to what he thought was the center of the room.

Elach tore his shirt in half and wrapped it around the pillar to slow his descent as much as possible and started sliding down. When he was about halfway down he aimed for the shadows’ convergence and pushed off, soaring all of ten feet before coming crashing down another ten feet short of the shadows. Steel crushed and goop splattered beneath him to break his fall, and Elach broke into a run while wildly swinging his club in front of him to try and clear a path to the convergence. The pillar crushed the crystals and ran into the ceiling with an audible clang, yellow shadows snaking out from the pillar to join their brethren. Yellow mimics burst free from the walls the instant the shadows added themselves to the convergence just a few feet in front of Elach, letting out a horrible shriek that echoed through the room and launching themselves forward with a speed the others could only dream of.

As his club smashed through another mimic Elach burst onto the convergence, and the floor under his feet sank. A new symbol shone beneath his feet, a conglomeration of all the others he’d filled in over the course of this portion of the trial, and the void shattered. One second there was nothing, and the next Elach was staring at a room utterly filled with mimics. There were even a few flying mimics that he thankfully hadn’t run into, their wings filled with goop stretched taught like skin on a tanning rack and their beaks opened in soundless shrieks as they plummeted to the ground in a burst of steel shards and goop. The hatch hissed open somewhere above him as Elach turned in a circle, taking in just how many mimics there were. They might have died fairly easy, but one good hit and they would have returned the favor.

Elach pushed through the sea of mimics as he made his way to the ladder, breaking into a small clearing where Resthollow’s symbol was visible just below where the ladder had raised itself ten feet into the air. Elach had to jump with his arms outstretched to grasp the lowest rung and drag it back down to him, and the steel clanged against steel as it bashed to the ground. But Elach didn’t climb up right away. He falls to his knees as the events of the day catch up with him, and all of his wounds burn in phantom pain that is the promise of pain to be. He questions if all of this was even worth it, since he could have just bonded with a simple Issi beast, or maybe even an enchanted weapon. He hugged himself tight and rocked back and forth, breathing in quick short breaths.

Snap.

He was halfway up the ladder before he looked back at the room so far beneath him for the last time. When he finally grabbed hold of the last rung and pulled himself back into the inkskipper’s room he was left with two choices; the same two he’d had before he went down into the void. As he walked towards the silver door through the hole in the whirlpool of ink, the entire room shook under his feet. The rock was shaken to pieces as the steel underneath vibrated at high speeds, emitting a sound like the constant ringing of a giant gong. Elach tugged on the silver door’s handle in a desperate attempt to squeeze out just a little more from this trial, but the steel under his feet was shot through with lines of white that coalesced into Resthollow’s crest and exploded in a geiser of light.