Since the preparations were already complete – whether I wanted them to be or not – I closed the heavy lids over my eyes and focused only upon my breathing and my magic. Slowly, I traced the flows of energy throughout my body and then slowly I spread my reach outwards to feel the energy surrounding us. The darkness in my spirit had grown and was now feeling like a cancerous sore that leaked and oozed miasma which slowly poisoned everything it touched.

The corruption in the crypt was even stronger and darker than ever before, and at the edge of my awareness, I could sense a tainted wave moving like a leaf across a pond. For a few moments, I nudged and probed at the disturbance with my magic, and finally I came to the conclusion that this darkness was slowly moving away from us and deep into the bowels of the earth. If my guess is correct, I assume that I was feeling the dark presence of Megan as she slowly moved from us and headed wherever the darkness called her too.

I’ll have to remember the feeling of that subtle spreading of darkness; it was almost like painting a black wall a darker shade of black, in the dark with no light. Such a subtle feeling, I doubt I could find it if it wasn’t moving. Even if it was moving, I wouldn’t want to stake my life on being able to track it down again. I’ll remember it, just in case I get lucky with it, but I’m not going to be able to rely on hunting that spreading corruption to find our way to them.

Realizing that Megan was leading me to get sidetracked from my own task at hand – or was it the corruption in my own soul trying to stop me from doing anything against it – I steeled my will and forced myself to focus on my breathing and the magic in the immediate area around me once again. A greasy slime seemed to cover everything; worse than it’d ever been before; and I feared that if we didn’t move soon, all of us were going to fall victim to the spirit-rot.

Feeling Crystal’s energy, she was unsurprisingly the one with the least amount of ‘slime’ clinging to her. Heartblade had a wonderful effect pushing the dead back, and it never left her side. Part of me was tempted to try and skip the spirit manipulation and to simply borrow the blade from her until we could escape from here, but I pushed that thought aside. Was such doubts my own natural caution and reluctance, or was it the darkness trying to stop me from dealing with it?

I honestly didn’t know; therefore, I chose to ignore my own gut warnings and proceed ahead anyway.

I was going to wait until after I’d finished manipulating Crystal’s spirit, before asking the girls to help numb me for my own ordeal, but I was already past that state. Slowly, I tried to match my breathing to Crystal’s, and I increased the flows of air magic between us. Moment by moment, I used what little I had learned merging Mongo and Tiffany, and I let the magic drift between us and into us. It slowly connected our lungs, and then our airways, and finally we were connected through the oxygen in our blood.

I could feel the air as it moved and circulated from Crystal to me, and then from me back to Crystal. Her exhale was my inhale; my exhale became her inhale. I had gotten this far with Mongo and Tiffany with no problem; but it was after this that things turned rather rough. While taking a few moments to match breathing, I slowly began to swap the magic of life for the magic of air.

Last time, I’d forcibly skinned Mongo layer by layer and then infused those layers of life into Tiffany. It’d worked, but it hadn’t been pleasant to perform, nor to watch according to the others. I didn’t want to torment neither Crystal nor myself in such a manner, so I decided to try a different route.

Whereas before I’d removed pieces of Mongo and inserted them into Tiffany, this time I maintained the slow circular rhythm that we’d established with our breathing. Slowly, gently, I eased the barest trickle of life out of Crystal. Like a wisp of candle smoke, a thin white trail of light gently drifted from her mouth and nostrils and over to mine. Patiently, I circulated the life energy throughout my body, and a sense of warmth tingled from my top to bottom.

As embarrassing at is was, I found myself growing erect as pleasure and energy flowed throughout my body. Trying to ignore the giggles which I had to assume were Tiffany’s, I continued to slowly circulate the life throughout my core, until it peacefully eased out of my own nostrils and throat and worked its way over to Crystal. Whereas Mongo had experienced an unmeasurable agony, I was experiencing untold ecstasy. I could feel Crystal from top to bottom; all her parts, with no exception, were connected, caressing, and reaching out to accept and embrace me.

Sex could not be as powerful, nor as intimate. We were connected. We were one. My heartbeat matched hers. My breath matched hers. My ecstasy matched hers. I found myself reaching a climax of undescribed power, and Crystal joined me in it. There’s truly no words to describe the experience.

For how long I was lost in this state of ultimate bliss, I can’t say. I was trapped in an endless cycle of passionate orgasm, until my body simply had nothing left for me to release; it was the pain of an empty explosion which finally snapped a sliver of my mind back into focus.

Pulling the tattered remains of my will together, I figured that we had shared and circulated more than enough life between us. At the moment, it was impossible to tell where one life began and where the other ended. We had truly merged our life forces together.

Slowly, I began to force the magic which controlled the connection to switch from the magic of life, to the magic of death. Just as before, I gently tugged and pulled a small piece of Crystal’s soul and circulated it through my own, before peacefully letting it pull itself back to her and take a section of my own spirit with it.

In and out, like a patient on a dialysis machine, her spirit flowed, circulated throughout my body, and then back into herself once again.

Once again, the feeling is…

… There is no words to describe it. I won’t even try. If sharing life is the ultimate ecstasy, then sharing souls is an experience a thousand times more intimate and powerful. By the time I managed to finally sever the connection, I couldn’t tell where Crystal stopped and when Mik’Hail began anymore.

Blinking once, I could see Tiffany and Jess standing over us, eyes wide in wonder. Blinking a second time, I could see them from a slightly different angle. Blinking again, I could see them once more from the first view.

‘Crystal; you’ll never be free from me now, I don’t think.’ I didn’t have to say the words. Thinking them was more than enough. She was me. I was her.

‘I don’t want to be, My Lord. I’m happy where I’m at.’

She didn’t need to say it. I could already feel the truth of her words in my very spirit.