The sensation was… total.
It wasn't just seeing. It was being. The darkness wasn't something that surrounded me; I was its substance and it was my body.
The rage from the torment, the recent pain, burned within me, but it was a cold fire, contained within this new and infinite form. A core of fury wrapped in the glacial calm of absolute blackness. I was not out of control. On the contrary. For the first time since I arrived in this hell, I felt total control.
I felt the world through the shadows.
Not five senses, but like an expanded whole. Every corner of the torture chamber, every crack in the stone, the residual heat of the inert bodies of the torturers like faint stains in my cold perception. I felt the tremor of the air beyond the door, the rapid heartbeat of a guard posted outside. The entire facility stretched before me like a map drawn in reliefs of darkness and small points of light-heat that were the torches and human lives. The shadows were extensions of me, and I, of them.
And my body… my body was a promise. It had no fixed limits. The darkness that composed me rippled, condensed, elongated. I could feel its malleable potential, like clay made of living night. I could be a hand, a claw, a mist, a thing with tentacles and maws. Will was the chisel. Darkness, the raw material. And inside me, the Spark of Darkness sang in silent ecstasy. This was my heritage, my true home. I did not fear the darkness. I was the fear the darkness had of itself.
I took a step. Or rather, the dark mass that was my being shifted forward, flowing over the cold stone.
I completely ignored the two inert mounds that had been my torturers. They were irrelevant, stains of the past.
I stopped in front of the stone wall. It was not an obstacle. To me, it was just an area of slightly different density in the landscape of shadows. My form dissipated, becoming intangible, and I simply passed through it. I emerged on the other side, in a corridor, directly in front of the guard who was watching the door.
He saw me. His eyes widened, his mouth opened slightly to shout an alarm that never came. I extended a thread of darkness, as fine as a needle and faster than his thought. It pierced his forehead. His life, that warm, pulsing point in my extended sense, was snuffed out instantly. Silence.
The main door was thick, reinforced with iron. To me, it was a line on the map. I concentrated my will and the darkness around me stirred. I didn't open it. I consumed it. The hinges, the wood, the metal, disintegrated in an instant in a vortex of voracious shadows, leaving a perfect hole into the main hall.
Inside, two shooters stationed in high galleries took aim. Their hearts beat like frantic drums in my perception. Before their fingers could pull the triggers, two spears of pure darkness rose from the shadows at their feet and impaled them from below. They fell.
The rest of the guards in the hall charged. Shouts. Gunfire. Their bullets passed through my insubstantial form, lost in the void. I felt nothing. They were just annoying noises, intrusive flashes of heat.
My attention focused on the side cells. There, huddled together, were the weak, trembling points of heat of the other slaves. The fear they emanated was a bitter mist. I did not want that. Not for them.
With a mental gesture, all the cell locks, simple metal mechanisms for my new understanding, gave way simultaneously. The doors swung open. The prisoners peeked out, terrified, confused, staring at the dark mass that had annihilated their captors.
There was no time for explanations. I didn't want them anyway. I felt a wave of new points of heat approaching through the corridors—many, armed with rage and fear. They were the reinforcements arriving to stop me.
The cold fury within me, the Fire of my determination, found its outlet. I would no longer be a human silhouette. I wanted to be terror itself. I wanted to be the nightmare from which they could not awaken.
My form collapsed in on itself and then exploded outward. I stopped trying to look human. I became a huge, shapeless mass that filled half the hall. From my dark, pulsing body sprouted dozens of tentacles ending in points sharp as stilettos. Multiple maws opened on the surface of the mass, circles of absolute void serrated with spikes of solid shadow. A collective whisper, the sound of wind through a sepulcher, emanated from me.
The slaughter was methodical, fast, and silent in its essence. The guards who entered through the doors were gulped down by the maws or skewered by the tentacles and absorbed into the main mass, where their essence, their heat, their life, dissolved into my darkness. I carefully avoided any trace of the slaves. For them, I was just a black storm roaring around them, killing everything dressed in armor or wielding a weapon.
But it was not enough. This prison, this laboratory of horrors, did not deserve to remain standing.
I felt the structure, its support points that held the whole place up. I concentrated all the vast energy of the darkness that was now me, all the cold fury, on a single point in front of me, in the outer wall.
The darkness around me contorted, compressed into a nucleus of infinite density, and then released.
There was no explosion of fire and debris.
There was a collapse.
A voracious hole of blackness, a small inverse sun, appeared and devoured. Stone, metal, beams, furniture, fleeing guards… half the facility simply ceased to exist, erased from reality, leaving a clean, smoking cut open to the night sky and freedom. The cold night wind blew through the hall, carrying the dust of what had been.
The slaves, covered in that dust, stared open-mouthed at the hole to freedom. My job was done. The dark mass that was me began to contract, to become denser.
That's when I felt it.
A different point of heat. Not the weak heat of a human, nor the furious heat of a guard. It was a concentrated, powerful nucleus, burning with disciplined intensity. It was moving towards me with a firm step, unhurried but unceasing, through the rubble. An Awakened. Stronger than anything that had been in this place.
He crossed the threshold into the hall. He was a man in gray armor, helmetless, with scars crossing his severe face. In his eyes there was no fear, only a cold assessment and palpable disdain. He wielded a long sword that shone with a pale white light, antithetical to my essence.
"Abominable monster!" he roared, his voice resonating with an authority that sought to impose order on the chaos. "By the Sovereign of the East, your chaos ends here! Your existence is an error I will correct! Surrender and your end will be…!"
I ignored him.
His speech, his titles, his threats… were just the buzzing of an insect. An irrelevant noise in the black immensity I inhabited. He saw a monster to defeat. I only saw a more intense point of heat than the others. A source of energy. A threat to the newly-won freedom of the weak points of heat.
I did not charge.
I did not adopt a stance.
Simply, from the dark mass that was me, one of the maws opened disproportionately, becoming enormous, a portal to nothingness. A black tentacle, faster than the reflex of his luminous sword, wrapped around him.
He shouted, a curse mixed with surprise, and swung his sword. The white light cut a section of the tentacle, which dissipated like smoke. But it was like cutting a river. More darkness replaced it instantly, immobilizing his arm, then his body.
His light fought, sputtering against my darkness. It was… irritating. Like a lit match in a deep cave. Annoying, but not a threat.
With a mental pull, I dragged him towards the open maw. His screams were choked off. His light went out. His powerful point of heat was absorbed, digested, added to the black immensity that was me. His essence, his strength, his very memory, dissolved into my nothingness, becoming part of the canvas.
Then, silence.
Only the wind through the giant hole, the muffled sobs of the liberated slaves, and I, a mass of darkness pulsing softly amid the destruction.
I felt the test coming to an end. The purpose had been fulfilled. The canvas had been painted with strokes of vengeance, freedom, and a terrible, cold power.
My consciousness began to detach from the dark mass. The form dissolved, not into flesh and bone, but into scattered shadows that merged with those of the night.
And then, there was nothing.
A vast and deep darkness, different from that of my form—deeper and more complete.
In that nothingness, a voice resonated, impersonal, ancient, and slightly impressed.
[Aspirant, your nightmare has ended. Prepare for your evaluation.]