Chapter 70: Ouroboros

My thoughts had turned sluggish and were about to slip entirely out of my control.

’Son of a bitch!’

The warmth from Thunder Sunlight was already climbing past anything I could safely hold, my own blood felt like it had started boiling somewhere beneath the surface, and underneath it, it felt colder and far more patient, the killing intent bleeding off Hunger of the Creepy Dagger kept rising, the two sensations tangling together in my chest until I could barely tell which one was actually going to kill me first.

I decided I should at least look at whatever was doing this to me.

Using every scrap of willpower I still had, I forced my head to turn, slow and shaking, my muscles were screaming in protest at the effort of moving even that much. It felt like dragging my own skull through wet cement.

[You Are Looking At A Beast Lord: Marionettist Choez]

It crouched low among the branches above, it was four-legged and roughly the size of a large dog, its wings dark as raven feathers folded tight against its back.

Its beak curved long and narrow, just like a crane, entirely wrong on a body built for something closer to a predator.

From twin horns curling back off its skull, thin shadowed strings unspooled outward, dozens of them, threading straight into my own shadow, overlapping, tightening, fighting for control of something I hadn’t even known could be taken from me.

Pain bloomed behind my eyes, that was sudden and blinding.

I opened my eyes again and saw that I was somewhere else entirely.

I was hovering above a vast, deep blue sea, endless in every direction, waves rolling slow and silent beneath me.

Rising out of its center stood a single island crowned by a tall mountain, jagged and ancient-looking.

Even as I watched, the sea was shrinking, drawing back from the shore in slow, deliberate pulls, and the mountain seemed to shrink right along with it, growing shorter with every passing second, crumbling at the edges like sand sliding off a shrinking pile.

My Domain of Mind.

I understood it instinctively, the way you understand your own name.

The mountain held my memories, everything I knew, every lesson and every scar carved into who I was.

The sea above represented my conscious mind, and somewhere in its depths, my subconscious, which was quiet and vast and utterly undefended.

I had thought of stealing its ability or his thoughts. However, on one hand, it was impossible because my Conciousness and subconciousness weren’t in my control.

On the other hand, Marionettist Choez wasn’t just trying to paralyze me.

It was trying to erase me. Hollow out my memory, drown my consciousness, and bend whatever was left underneath into something that answered to strings instead of thought.

’Not happening.’

I forced myself out, wrenching free of the domain with everything I had left, my thoughts were screaming back into place one fractured piece at a time.

The world snapped back into focus just in time for me to see the Calfeeth’s mouth already stretched wide, inches from my face, close enough that I could smell the rot on its breath, thick and sour and wrong.

"Edmund!" Sera screamed, her voice cracking with something raw.

Grumb!

Its jaws closed around my head and pulled.

There wasn’t even time for real pain. Just a flash of white, a wet, tearing pressure, and then nothing at all. Blood sprayed hot across my collar in the same instant my body understood, somewhere far too late, that it no longer had a head attached to it.

And then, impossibly, everything reversed.

Seven stars burned into existence somewhere I couldn’t place, hanging in a black, formless space, coldly and silently and utterly indifferent to whatever had just happened to me.

Something vast and indescribable seized hold of me, yanking me backward through time itself like a thread pulled taut and snapped back the other way, faster than thought and faster than fear.

I opened my eyes.

I was standing near the tree again. The same tree that had white leaves glowing faint and pale, dark wood trunk rising twenty feet into a sky I now recognized far too well.

I looked down at my hands and to my surprise they moved.

I flexed my fingers, disbelieving, and looked up to find Sera, Mary, Theodore, and Arthur exactly where they had been standing before, none of them looking at me like anything strange had happened at all.

"Edmund, wait!" Arthur shouted, and I realized, with a lurch that had nothing to do with fear this time, that I was already walking toward the tree, exactly the way I had the first time, my body was apparently determined to repeat every mistake down to the last footstep.

The tree’s branches shifted toward us, slowly and deliberately, the same way they had before, watching, waiting.

I stood frozen, confusion crashed over me in waves I couldn’t organize into anything useful.

What had just happened? How was I standing here? Why did none of them remember a Calfeeth tearing my head clean off my shoulders only moments ago?

Then I saw it... The one causing things.

Coiled along one of the higher branches, something that hadn’t been there the first time.

A snake that was massive and larger even than I was, its scales were dark and glistening faintly in the tree’s pale light, its eyes were closed in something between sleep and meditation, its jaws locked around the end of its own tail, slowly and patiently devouring itself.

A small portion was already gone, the wound clean and bloodless, as though the act barely registered as violence at all.

Recognition of it hit me like a physical blow.

I knew that symbol. Every astrology textbook had one Chapter dedicated to this symbol. The symbol of a snake or a serpent that is devouring its own tail.

It was Ouroboros!

Also known as The symbol of Regression and The Loop of Time!