Awareness returned in hesitant, trickling increments. It filled me with a pounding ache, as if the cup of my mind had been dry for so long it didn't know what to make of this new sensation. My eyes fluttered, open but unfocused, and I felt hard floor beneath my hands as I lifted myself up.

I sat within a hall of black marble, dressed in a gown of smooth, unrumpled silk. There were no windows but for the ones at the hall's end, and beyond those smoked panes I saw nothing but wavering blue flames. Twin pits flanked the walkway, and pillars raised the arched roof and dropped into oblivion in those untenable depths. Before me the hall stretched, and situated at its middle was a long table of thick, dark stone. There were two chairs. One of them was occupied.

I wouldn't have called his chair anything less than a throne. It, too, was comprised of that glossy, black material I didn't have a name for, a stone so dark it devoured light. The throne was situated upon a dais at the table's head, and when the Baal stood from its depths, the shadow of his warped, broken wings fell upon me.

"A dangerous gambit, little shadeborn," the King Below said as he descended the dais and those warped appendages disintegrated into the dark. I could see little of his countenance, silhouetted as he was against the windows bathed in flames. "Handing your mind over to a shade and expecting to get it back. Dangerous."

He lacked his usual cloak of night and chittering, half-mad things—but I sensed larger bodies moving unseen in the dark, trailing their master like well-tamed hounds.

Those rigid fractals of light and color roved through the air. This was a dream, but not a dream. A vision, of sorts. It had to be some kind of power of his to step into my nightmares with such ease.

My thoughts were raw and savaged, but my mind felt...whole. Sluggish, but whole.

"What...what is this place?" I asked as I managed to get my feet underneath myself. The floor was ice cold.

The Baal paused as he walked and tapped his talons along the length of the table. "Home."

Home? I looked at the ancient hall made of nothing but black stone and the yawning darkness surrounding us. The only light came from those fires outside and the dim braziers hanging from chains on the ceiling. Home. A throne fit for a king of shadows. "We're in the Pit."

"To be precise, you're still in that cell." He cocked his head and spoke as if commenting on the weather and not my certain doom. "I thought it kinder to bring your mind here, away from the pain. The loss. The devastation."

"As if you know anything about kindness." I touched my wounded side—but found nothing there. No wound, no ache. The Baal controlled every aspect of my being within this dream-like state.

"I beg to differ. I know much of kindness, and much of cruelty." Tap, tap, screech. His talons raked the table's surface. Those burning eyes of his glowed in the blackness.

Despite the unease pervading me, I allowed anger to infiltrate my voice. I had a lot of anger and rage boiling in my gut after what had happened to me. God, I prayed my parents were okay. I prayed I woke up soon.

"If you know so much about kindness, then fucking do something!" I snarled, stomping one bare foot onto the cold, cold floor. "Do something! Do something for Darius and Peroth! Stop Balthier!"

The Baal didn't react to my anger. He registered my words with the same permissive smirk upon his lips. "You mistake kindness for indulgence, and judge my children by the standards of your mortality. You think me cruel for not punishing or killing Balthazar, when he is but a small hurtle in what is to come. His behavior is that of a child compared to what I guard against."

He went to tap one of those cut fractals roving through the air, but it fizzled in a puff of green, acrid smoke before he could touch it.

"You make excuses!"

"I give what they need. How do you expect them to survive immortality if they cannot survive and handle Balthazar, one of their own?"

My frustration left in a strained moan of defeat. I'd been warned the Baal was capricious, that he'd sooner kill them all for the trouble than help settle their problems. I was a fool for trying to entreat his assistance.

The longer I stood in silence, the more I considered his words and their meaning permeated my thick skull. I would see cruelty in all he did—but I wasn't immortal. I couldn't fathom the reasoning of an ancient creature like the Baal, and yet...some intrinsic part of me that was older than my flesh and bones understood.

The Baal's inattentiveness wasn't an act of passive-aggression or malice. The Sins faced tribulations of a massive scale and would continue to face more if they survived. By removing his aid, by refusing his cooperation, the Baal forced the Sins to act on their own cognizance. Like a mother bird coercing her chicks from the nest, he obliged them into solving their own dilemmas and into becoming hardier—if more bitter—monsters.

Those chicks would either fly or fall to their deaths.

Even as part of me understood him, the majority of my human consciousness reviled him. I hated him because of what he'd done to Darius.

"That's why you tortured him, isn't it?" I said, stepping back from the fading light of the flames. "Not because you wanted to assert your will or because he broke your stupid rules. You did it because you wanted to remake him. You conceived the theoretical idea of creation, but you failed in the execution. You seek to break your toys and to make them into better versions. I get that now."

His boots were silent upon the floor as he neared, his presence an ominous, encroaching threat. He wasn't smirking now. Tap, tap, screech. "They are not toys."

"No, they're not. You once told Peroth things cannot be remade, only reborn—and yet I don't think you fully understood your own meaning, because you're still seeking to remake them. To remake...those." I pointed into the shadows towards those unseen things as I continued to retreat. Every instinct in my body screamed to run from him. "Perhaps, like me, you've said the words so many times they've simply lost meaning—but I'm beginning to understand. They cannot be remade. They can only be reborn. The trimming from the plant. The broken can never be the same again."

The Baal snarled. The sound was ungodly, like the vengeful scream of a tortured wildcat set free upon its captors. His power had surrounded me, and suddenly it drew taut as chains. He'd been before me, standing like a statue at the table's edge, and then he was everywhere. His clawed hand was at my waist, the other holding my arm above my head as he forced me to stare into those eyes that shone like dying suns.

"You see much, little shadeborn," he quietly laughed. "Perhaps too much."

"What I've never figured out—," I managed to choke past my rising panic. "Was why you came to me. Why me?"

His lips parted enough to reveal the tips of lupine teeth. "Ahh, and I thought that was obvious. It had nothing to do with you. I reached for Darius's mind, and found...yours."

The Baal twisted me within his punishing grip until I was turned around. Behind me, standing there as if he'd been there the entire time, was an image of Darius. Blue-eyed and confused, the image of Darius kept his attention on the Baal as his pale lips formed soundless words.

"Darius!" I cried as I lunged for him only to have the Baal to restrain me. I struggled, bare feet striking Veleph's shins and boots as his talons bit into my thin arms. "Let go!"

To my surprise, he did let go—and I stumbled into the Sin of Pride's image. The image's hands snapped up at the last second to catch my shoulders as if it hadn't been aware it could do so. His fingers felt cold and solid against my flesh.

"Darius," I called yet again, and the image finally dropped its arctic gaze from the Baal. The face was familiar, and yet the expression was one of befuddlement and didn't contain an ounce of recognition. It wasn't Darius. Not entirely.

After finding my balance, my fingertips grazed the cool skin of his cheek as I sought anything of the Darius I knew in this mirage's visage. I sought his anger, his cynicism, his pride, and found nothing. Somehow, it made seeing the Sin all that much more painful.

The image's blue eyes dimmed as my hand slipped away. Color bloomed in his face as red swept through his irises and stole the cold, emotionless blue until naught but the furious crimson remained.

His voice caught up to the shift in color like noise chasing light. "Sara."

Darius's image disappeared. I gasped when I lost his support and crumpled to the floor, managing to catch myself before I could bash my face into the stones. The Baal's merciless laughter tore a growl from my lungs as I rolled to my side to see him where he'd last been. He held his arms apart before his chest, and between his clawed hands appeared a cracked mirror.

The pale, tired woman reflected in the silver glass had one blue eye, and one red.

Shocked, I felt for my own eye and saw black, taloned fingers trace my skin.

The mirror swiveled, then shattered to iridescent dust.

"You're welcome." The Baal smirked as he straightened and returned to the room's throne. His boots remained silent as the grave, as if no sound dared mark his passage.

"Wait—!" I yelled, panting as I went to rise and found my legs too unsteady to bear my weight. "Wait, tell me what it means—!"

The vision waned as the blackness stretched forth and crawled nearer its dread father. Only the delineation of his towering form against the windows bathed in blue fire was visible. His shadow was thrown from the breadth of his shoulders like a cape meant to cover and shroud all of the world.

"Wait—!"

The chitter and chatter of his unformed children robbed me of my voice as the dark became a tangible thing.

"King of dirt and earth and bone!"

"King of shade meant to atone!"

"My King of war, my King of yore—!"

"The shadows, the night, the world you sow!"

"Forever the dark in which we sleep—!"

"My beloved King Below!"

Something had its clammy hands on my ankles. I kicked and fumbled for purchase on the smooth floor, but the darkness was a riptide I couldn't outswim. As its rapids overcame the hall and the Baal's children dragged me into the shadows, I screamed his name.

The Baal began to turn, then paused as his smoldering gaze found mine.

I think he heard me.