Purple…
It was the colour of royalty; the colour of kings and queens, of emperors and empresses. It was the colour of kingdoms and empires; The colour of nations that conquered lands and people alike.
It also represented wisdom and knowledge; scholars who amassed knowledge from yore and yonder. Sages, both young and old, who hold troves of books and secrets.
Purple, the colour of the mighty. Purple, the colour of the wise and knowledgeable. Purple, a colour filled with might and a mystic majesty.
This was the very colour that painted Aries's soul, staining it with an amethyst glow. This purple—unlike the great and majestic colour of kings—did not represent knowledge and wisdom, like his library of memories that held knowledge from times long forgotten and times before the dawn of even the primordial humans, nor did it represent might and authority, like his foregone nature as a being above and beyond the gods themselves.
No… This purple represented something simple, something that even the animals of the wild felt… Fear.
A fear that engulfed Aries with so much horror and fright, so much gut-wrenching dread that penetrated deep into his very being, that his mind was left riddled with scars.
He vividly remembered experiencing five different illusions—Including the first—that left deep scars in their wake. The first was of a silver heart within the moon— his past self.
The second took him back to a primaeval past. He stood in the presence of a gigantic, primordial tree. Its roots spanned across the vast lands of the first world, digging its roots into the surface and reaching into its core. It was like an idol that served to protect the primordial forest. It filled him with both awe and dread.
The third was almost like the complete opposite. He witnessed a massive firebird that flew across the unclaimed skies of that same primaeval world. Its presence was that of utter destruction and chaos. Laying eyes upon it, he felt as if he would burst into flames for an eternity.
The fourth showed another of the horrors of the primaeval world. He beheld a demonic wolf that towered above even the tree that encased the world in its roots. The wolf was one of the primordial gods and the progenitor of nature. Witnessing such an awe-inspiring and awesome being, he felt a pressure beyond what he felt when seeing his original self; Far beyond it, in fact.
The last moved on from the primaeval world's horrors. A primordial terror so vast and dread-inducing that even his past self had shrunk away from it, experiencing godly fear for the first and last time.
He did not get to witness the visage of the horror for more than a split moment before the illusion shattered under its terrifying pressure.
Experiencing these horrors one after another, Aries was left reeling. His mind spun as he struggled to get a grip on himself.
For a while, he felt as if he was still drifting in a speckled void while also trekking the lands of the primaeval world, taking in the horrors from times long forgotten.
By the time he came to, the mosquito's spasming body was already growing still, its life extinguished before he knew.
The rat and girl had mangled his body while he had been absorbed in taking in fear from the mosquito. He was bleeding heavily from every direction, pools of blood trailing behind him as marks left behind from chasing the mosquito. The only reason he was standing, or even alive, was due to his enhanced constitution, but even he would drop dead if he didn't finish the fight quickly and rest to heal.
Looking around him, he was now in a completely different area than before, and the girl and rat who were supposed to be not far from him were nowhere to be seen.
This was undoubtedly a good thing for him, as it allowed him the time to rest and stabilize his mind. If he wasn't careful, he could easily lose himself in fear with his current state if he didn't.
Quickly finding a place to lie down, He drifted into a half-sleep so he could rest while keeping vigilant. He closed his eyes and tried to drift away, but he failed. Each time he tried to close his eyes, a flash of one of the illusions appeared in his mind, leaving him up in a cold sweat.
'What's going on? Is the mosquito still affecting me somehow?'
He saw no reason for the images of the illusions to appear before him anymore; the mosquito was dead, and he had mostly regained his senses. Not only were the illusions still plaguing him, but the terror he felt while experiencing them was ever present, and more so when he saw the flashes of the illusions, only slightly dampened.
No matter how he looked at it, he couldn't understand what was happening to him, only that it was happening. The only viable explanation he could conjure up was that the mosquito was somehow still affecting him.
While most beings' powers stop working after they die, in special circumstances their abilities could go on being active. Due to this, Aries believed that this was the reason he was still affected by the illusions.
'Why am I shivering?'
He couldn't believe it; there was no way he could be shivering— he wasn't cold; in fact, he was currently hot. Even if he was, he wouldn't be shivering.
'What the hell is happening to me?'
After settling himself and a bit of failure, he finally succeeded in gaining a few minutes of rest, though plagued with nightmares and images of the illusions he experienced.
A few minutes later, he had gotten a sufficient amount of rest, but he chose to stay for a few minutes longer. Before he had the chance to continue resting, however, a tremor shook him awake as a flash of lightning struck.
He was ninety percent sure that it had struck the place he was coming from, but wasn't completely sure. He also sensed fluctuations of chi from the lightning, so he knew that a mystic—likely Alice—was in combat.
He quickly rose from his resting position and dashed toward the direction of the lightning.