Angar knelt upon the warped soil of Abyssalhome, his legs beneath him, his gauntlets resting palms-up on his knees, the ashfall hissing against his unhelmed head and armored form, the crimson sky above a perpetual bruise, the distant thunder rumbling.

  His greaves and cybernetics sank slightly into the cracked earth, the twisted thorns scraping hungrily at the metal, easily ignored.

  The conversation with Garioch lingered in his mind, a reminder of how chains of frailty bound lesser men and the unyielding path life demanded of him, carved through blood and will and duty.

  He silenced his thoughts.

  The Mindscape called, that vast and terrible expanse where madness met infinity, where the Grays had claimed sole dominion until he appeared.

  Eeshek’tik's promised lessons awaited, three keys to improve his crude but superior method of psionic fury, to transform his battering ram of resolve into a much bigger and more refined battering ram of resolve.

  He would claim his due.

  Thin air corrupted with a foul taint filled his lungs. No incense burned here, no sanctified oils to ease the ascent, only the harsh bite of his own sweat escaping the folds of armor and padding at his neck.

  He drew it in, spinning his core, that molten orb of gold which no other had forged as he had.

  Angar turned inward, plunging past the surface clamor of his thoughts. He did not purge these emotions, for to do so would be weakness, a surrender to the placid doctrines of men less capable than him, those who chained their passions like beasts in a pen.

  No, he harnessed them, weaving hatred into focus, pride into a hammer, fervor into fuel, fury into a furnace, letting them stoke the inferno within.

  He was superior, unbreakable, a Crusader who would never compromise. All would shatter upon the anvil of his will.

  His breath deepened, each inhale drawing in the mana sacra, converting it, cycling it.

  Power threaded upward along his spine, igniting channels scarred by endless ordeals, battles of flesh, corruptions of soul, the psychic fury of Nofelim and demon alike.

  Bio-electric sparks danced along nerves synced with cybernetic enhancements, his body alive with faith, with Holy wrath.

  The air around him grew hazy, thicker, as if the blighted world recoiled from his virtue.

  Deeper he delved, visualizing the hub-plane not as a distant whisper but as an enemy bastion to be stormed.

  Sweat beaded on his brow, trickling like blood from stigmata, his muscles tensing, his lips cracking as they stretched too wide in a painful grimace, blood mingling with the ash that dusted his face, the pain his sacrament.

  Frustration he embraced, letting it fuel the assault. His Ignis Sanctum roared to life, his mid and upper cores throbbing in sync, his heart pounding against the confines of mortality, of reality.

  The camp seemed to warp as shadows lengthened unnaturally, the sky narrowing in judgment.

  Then he felt it. He felt the pull, like a pulse of gravity, just a whisper, but stronger than during other attempts, the hub-plane's heartbeat.

  He surged toward it, commanding his form to grow gigantic and his mind to ascend, his will hammering against the veil like a siege engine against a portcullis, blocked by the membranous, adamant barrier.

  He roared mentally, growing his form further, as he had against the arch-druden, battering relentlessly, over and over, tenacious and unforgiving as the tides.

  Pain lanced through his true body, his innards scorching, blood vessels bursting in his eyes until crimson tears streaked his face.

  His body locked rigid, visions assailed him, the air grew charged, his synapses blazing in agonized fury.

  Doubt whispered, fatigue clawed, but he crushed them beneath his heel.

  He would not yield.

  Existence yielded again, though very grudgingly, again, and the veil flexed, groaning as it surrendered to his inevitability, flinging his conscience into the hub-plane's unimaginable vastness.

  Angar manifested as a disembodied essence, a flickering wisp of will adrift in the colossal desolation.

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  Ignoring everything else, he focused on sensing the Mindscape portal. It was closer than ever before.

  Luck, or the Three's grace, had spawned him much nearer, in a peripheral alcove where the floor sloped into abyssal cracks, pillars of obsidian towering like the spines of colossal beasts.

  He blazed forward, dissolution nibbled at his edges, his essence fraying like a rope under a knife.

  His streak of willful flame blew through the dust-choked expanse. Portals whispered temptations as he passed, the runes beneath pulsing malevolently, as if awakening to his intrusion, the environment growing oppressive, like it sought to stop him, to prevent him from going further, to drag him into the forbidden.

  His essence dimmed, unraveling mote by mote, but he pressed on, his sense of the Mindscape’s portal growing stronger.

  Then he spotted it, a distant door of swirling madness, like the cluster of black holes at the galaxy's heart, devouring all in inescapable grasp.

  Time unraveled him faster now, the fraying accelerating. Whispers assaulted him, not like those of the darkness, more like thoughts of the shadows observing from the periphery, questioning his breach. That was new.

  Pain echoed from his corporeal form, terrible pain. He would not yield.

  The portal drew closer and closer as his essence waned, a vortex of scarlet engulfing the cosmos, then parting as he hurled what little was left of him toward it.

  With a final surge of will, he crossed into the threshold.

  The hub-plane dissolved behind him, annihilation claiming his trailing fragments, but he was through, flung into the Mindscape's infinite weave, where consciousness met nothingness, where self dissolved into the cosmic weave like ink in a wine-dark sea.

  He was met by the silent roar of infinity. Then, abruptly, the void yielded.

  Clarity bloomed not as light, but as an overwhelming expanse of shadowed luminescence, where thoughts manifested as rivers of raw essence, flowing through voids of infinite black.

  Distant echoes of alien minds reverberated, entities woven from threads connecting all that lived and died, observing all, knowing all, knowing nothing.

  Angar floated disembodied in this unimaginable vastness, reduced to utter insignificance, but somehow profoundly alive, linked not only to the spectral presences but to the entirety of existence and oblivion's cold embrace.

  Voices invaded his consciousness. "It returns, the Terran," they murmured, not in words but in impressions that seared his mind. "The one the First-of-Glories named Son-of-a-Chief returns."

  No forms of withered Gray heads materialized this time, no barrage of probing queries from those who had first claimed this mad realm.

  He searched, remembering the spectral resonance of that ancient presence, the colossal weight of Eeshek’tik's mind like a shadow cast across the void, vast and unyielding as the judgment of the Three upon a Heretic's soul.

  But the Gray's astral form was absent, a void where once there had been something radiant, he knew was the First-of-Glories they spoke of.

  “Someone must return, inform the First,” one voice stated, a thread of alien thought slithering through the ether. “Yes, go, inform the First-of-Glories. We give our own gift. We manifest the Oracle,” another added.

  Other voices chimed in, a deluge of probing queries and distant deliberations, but Angar tuned them out as something sharp to all his senses filled the void to his front, shapes coalescing from the swirling plasma, twisting into being with the groan of ancient mechanisms awakening from eons of slumber.

  No crimson staircase materialized this time, no ritual ascent to a door of cosmic doom.

  Instead, the expanse warped into a labyrinth of incandescent, almost flaming threads pulsing like a titanic heart, veins of fire weaving through the infinite black in patterns that defied the geometry of mortal minds. Or Terran minds, at least.

  Without knowing the source of his certainty, he understood this construct was for him to conquer, some sort of trial, demanding he navigate its maze.

  He willed himself forward, his disembodied form surging along one such strand, drawn by an inescapable compulsion that tugged at his core like the gravitational pull of a black hole upon all close to it.

  As he traversed the maze, sensations bombarded him, memories and emotions, but elusive, impossible to clasp or know, not even their basic nature, not if they were good or bad, soothing or painful, virtuous or sinful.

  He pushed onward, time losing all meaning in the maze.

  During the trek, somehow his form, already reduced to utter insignificance, became one of absolute importance, inundated with profound nonsense.

  Without knowing how he knew, he knew eons passed as he learned how meaningful futility truly was.

  Then some sanity and clarity returned as he advanced through the trial, finding its heart, its nexus emerging as a swirling orb of multi-hued lights where the rivers of flame converged, throbbing with overwhelming power.

  As he approached, the emanating power battered into his insignificant form. He took it, the pain it caused, and kept moving, refusing to falter or swerve from his goal.

  At last, he reached the lights, and from their depths materialized a casket of blackened ether, ornate as a reliquary forged for a grand cathedral, beckoning him to unveil its secret.

  Angar opened it, his will extending like a gauntleted hand into the void.

  “You may ask one question, mortal, so ask,” a voice commanded, resonating from every direction, a chorus of interlayered voices speaking as one, all ancient and infantile, benevolent and malign, the echo of creation's first word mingled with oblivion's last sigh.

  A strange lucidity flooded him, his thoughts sharpening like a razor, far clearer than in the haze of fleshly existence.

  He was being granted a great gift. The gift of a revelation. The gift of certainty.

  Questions blurred through his mind in a torrent, each discarded like chaff, such as the secrets of superiority, or paths to unrivaled might.

  Only three endured, burning brightest, and of those, only one was anchored in faith, the true purpose of this temporal existence, the test preparing the soul for Heaven's eternal bliss, or Hell’s unending agonies.

  “How may I better serve the Lord God in this life?” he intoned, knowing it was the only truly important question to ask, that he had won this game, as anticipation swelled like a balloon about to pop, eager for the Oracle's profound revelation.

  It answered without pause, its many voices like a mystical voicelessness, laced with the enigma of the long forgotten, veiled in the mist of time. “That which can be spoken is not the truest path to serve.”

  Frustration infused Angar's Mindscape form, the response empty, useless, utterly devoid of meaning.

  Fury came hotter than the pain already wracking his mortal frame.

  That vapid drivel was the Oracle's great and profound revelation?