Alex's chest throbbed.
There was what could only be described as a cramp in his heart. It was like a portion of his chest around it was trying to squeeze into itself. The feeling wasn't exactly painful, but it was far from comfortable. Its intensity grew stronger with every passing second.
Finley said something about heart blood. Is this what happens when you connect with it? If it is, where the hell is the Visualization? There's no way its invisible or something, right?
Alex had to admit it would have been particularly ironic if a Visualization was invisible. That felt like it defeated the entire purpose of the word. Any amusement he had was quickly swallowed by the deepening lump in his heart.
His teeth gritted as the unease started to shift into pain. This wasn't right. Some irrational part of his brain suggested trying to dig away through his flesh until he reached the antagonistic lump and ripped it out.
Did Berith manage to do something? Shit. Every second that goes by lowers the chances I manage to pull this off. If Berith snaps out of his before I'm done, all the Credits I spent to try and yoink his Visualization are going to go up in flames.
"What the hell is going on?" Alex hissed. His lungs throbbed with the effort of trying to draw breath. It felt like even the air within them was being pulled into the growing mass in his heart. "And whatever it is, could it please speed up?"
Color abruptly exploded through the darkness surrounding him. There was a pop in his chest like the pressure had suddenly equalized. Alex drew in a sharp, surprised breath as he felt his insides stop twisting and return to normal.
Solid ground slammed into his feet as a scene painted itself into being in wide, sweeping brushstrokes. Grey bricks bloomed around Alex. They were old and weathered, illuminated by flickering orange light cast by torches on the walls of the room forming around him.
Vines twisted through the cracks in the stone. Feelers rose off them, tiny tendrils swaying in the air like little strands of hair. They swayed as if caught in a wind felt only by them — there certainly wasn't any actual wind in the room. It was as still and dead as the grave.
And rising in the very center of the room was a stone pillar. It ran from the floor to the ceiling, but the very center of it had had a large chunk taken out of it, leaving the top and bottom halves separated. The ends of the pillar halves were jagged and sharp, but there were no traces of the piece that had once made them whole.
Floating in its place was a cube.
It hung suspended in the air, rotating in a lazy spiral around a fixed axis at its core. The strange cube pitch black, so dark that the very light around it seemed to bend inward toward its center. The very air around the cube was stretched and warped, as if the cube had a gravitational pull so immense that nothing could pass by it uncontested.
Of course, it couldn't have had such a powerful gravitational pull. If it had, Alex was pretty sure he would have been turned to spaghetti from his proximity to it. He didn't feel himself even getting pulled toward the cube… but that wasn't to say it had no presence at all.
While it was completely soundless, there was something more within the cube. It was not a sensation that any of the five senses could detect. But, if humans really did possess a sixth, then Alex suspected it would have been this.
The cube had a sense of authority. The cube seemed to demand that the world acknowledged its presence. Gazing upon it was like looking on a planet that had been crushed down to a single point.
It wasn't about its size or shape or any physical characteristic that the odd object possessed. The sensation came from the cube's very being. Its mere existence asserted itself upon the world with such insistence that Alex couldn't help but feel his eyes drawn back to it whenever he tried to glance anywhere else.
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His eyes dried. For several long seconds, Alex could do absolutely nothing but stare at the cube before him. He didn't breathe a word. For that matter, he barely even breathed. He didn't dare to.
All he could do was stare.
Not the power of some king trying to force believe people of his rule. Not the power of a warrior brandishing his blade or even a mage calling down the heavens to prove that his mastery over the forces of the universe was so great that none could stand in her path.
This was real power. The power of absolute authority. Undeniable and unflinching.
Alex had no idea where the thoughts came from, but some deep part of him, far below his psyche, so core to his very being that it felt like they came from the soul itself, knew this to be true.
He couldn't have denied the thoughts if he'd wanted to. They were like natural laws scrawling themselves out before him. They simply were.
"What are you?" Alex breathed. His words felt loud in the completely still room. He felt like they should have echoed, but the cube swallowed even that. They were foreign. The cube did not allow for their presence within its room, and so they simply ceased to be.
This can't be Berith's Visualization, can it? It doesn't feel like him at all. It feels… I don't know. Different. I don't even know if I dare admit this, but it feels more intense than Berith. Perhaps its because he's sealed? Is this why he was sealed?
The words sounded wrong to Alex's internal ear. No matter how he looked at it, this presence didn't remind him of Berith at all. The demon's presence was completely different to that of the cube. They couldn't have been more different.
A shimmer of green light crackled over the surface of the cube.
It didn't respond to his question with words, but there was an unmistakable shift within its presence. Alex's question had been heard.
And it seemed it would be answered. Color bloomed across the cube like oil spilling across the surface of the ocean.
An image bloomed upon its surface, diffracted and trapped by the cube's razor-sharp edges. Then another followed after, so fast that the first barely even had a moment to register in Alex's mind. They came one after the other at such a speed that he may as well have been watching a movie.
And then the visions were no longer within the cube. They were everywhere around Alex. But he couldn't just see them. He could feel them.
His eyes went wide as heat slammed into him in a wall. Roaring flames surrounded him, rising up to steal from the heavens themselves.
Then the vision changed. Twisting horns of some ancient monstrosity loomed in the sky skewering the stars themselves and casting shadows longer than mountains.
An ocean of blood. It stretched around him in every direction, seemingly swallowing the very horizons. Waves the size of tsunamis crashed and bore down upon shores of bleached white bone with a thunderous roar. The smell of blood filled Alex's nostrils as its taste coated his throat.
And then Alex stood in the room once more. His heart slammed in his chest and cold sweat prickled against his back. His clothes were soaked through. For a moment, he thought it was blood, but it was only sweat.
What the hell is this? How long was I in those visions? What's going on?
The cube didn't offer any response. It didn't need to. All those visions, the things he had seen… those were like Berith. He could feel tiny fragments of that power within the way the demon carried himself.
It was like Berith was the reflection of the visions cast upon a rippling lake. The energy within those visions had been the aura of a destroyer that Alex had expected to find — and for the first time, it struck him just how powerful Berith truly must have been.
If this is Berith's presence… is he holding it back? Or are those chains binding it down?
But the question passed through Alex's mind before it could receive an answer. His eyes couldn't tear themselves away from the cube floating before him as a new thought rose to take the place of the old one.
The presence before him now — not that of the destroyer, but of the cube itself — was most certainly not from Berith.
And Alex hadn't missed the implications of what the cube had shown him. Berith's power, everything that made his visualization up, had been trapped within the cube. And now it was gone.
All that remained was the pitch black cube floating before him.
It was trying to send him a message.
Perhaps Visualizations were context based. What was powerful for one person wouldn't fit as well for another. Alex didn't know. He barely even knew what a Visualization actually was, much less how they worked.
But he knew one thing for certain. If he understood what was going on correctly, then compared to whatever Berith's Visualization was…
The cube was stronger.