Is this the end of life?

  The great reverie before one’s unfolding?

  Have I died?

  Ronjah seemed to float without a body untethered to anything. And yet…

  Around him was chaos. Impressions of pain, fear - a tempest of rage and frustration. All within and without the mirror of his current visible perception. And yet he felt it. The anguish and desperation echoing through him.

  Was he in Morgoroth? The prison of the Vashtnal - the space of after-life from which the most sinful wailed their regrets?

  “It’s not often that my meals perceive the truth of reality,” a disembodied voice rang out. It echoed from all directions, heralded by a penumbra of dread.

  It wasn’t a total darkness- but an enveloping chasm of fear. It wasn’t the deepest fear that the llcyran prince had felt, but it was as palpable as the uboa tree bark he had ingested in his youth. As the thought arose, he was right back at the event:

  The 70 year-old D’varoan youth marched through the dark ash-streaked paths - hidden paths. Paths deep within the Root Province that led to the heart of the Dreamshedded Forests tread only in times of ritual. Acolytes beating through the tangling vines and overripe grasses with blackened machete and fiery yet timid heart. They were barely adult, not yet initiated, but physically mature, ready for the sacred right reserved for the most secretive and elite of the Imperium’s warriors. Ronjah stumbled, his feet getting caught in the leaves and branches littering the ground under the dense canopies of the Adaoba Karaktu trees. The trees were beautiful, towering above the llcyrans like redwoods, their branches weaving together above the bulbous trunks tethering the roots deep beneath the soil like anchors. How the thick branches were able to stretch for miles before sprouting into the broad canopies that obscured the sun and lit the ground below into an endless penumbra was often a topic of debate to the children who had spent weeks under the Karaktu’s shade. Cities far beyond the site of the sight of the visitors stretched across the skyward branches, cemented by the tree’s own solid grip on both earth and sky. But they weren’t here for tourism. No, they were here for a ritual.

  Ronjah’s thoughts at the time had been on questioning how his fellow D’varoans – people he’d been estranged from until recently had managed to achieve such an engineering marvel. At the time, if he recalled correctly, he had concluded that the eilonkiin - elves had likely been involved. Now, living back within the memory, his mind was on his body. Or at least what should have been his body.

  “Ronjah, keep up! We’re not going to look for you if you get lost.”

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  He snapped out of his introspection, just like he had almost 40 years ago. Perhaps he was dreaming, or had been dreaming. “Of course Jago, sir!” He replied as he had then.

  As he had then… What exactly had him remembering his current trek through the woods, his mission to complete his final test. Was it the constant chill permeating through his body, a cold originating from his bones?

  As Ronjah started to focus, the chill intensified into a raging inferno. He felt his eyes roll back and his body start to convulse. At first he assumed he had snapped out of the memory, but the soft crunch of the adaoba leaves centered him back further along the memory. Somehow, he had been shunted forward in time.

  The pain, the pain was unbearable. The adults – the elders, they had given him and his co-initiates a broth. Peeled from the Uboa Karaktu Tree - small, thin, and clumped together in the middle of an unmarked clearing, the bark was as splintered as a scab. The inner part of the bark had been seeped in a boiling bone broth until the water itself was red as blood. They had all sipped – a bitter tasting liquid, and nearly coughed up the tea, forcefully swallowing as the bitterness exploded into pain as they lay down on their backs. Ronjah’s limbs flailed as his mind blanked before memories – memories that were not his own erupted.

  The memories were like fragmented glass - some repeated like fractals others contradicted in paradox. His mother, assassinating a rival in her younger years, but before he could even focus on that memory - another llcyran female, a young iluun, swung from the sails of a D’varoan longboat coated in frost, the shores of a foreign coast on fire. And then another – an Insian commoner fleeing from a lance of flame - the assailant one of Ronjah’s own kind – a distant ancestor. And infinitely more throughout space-time all competing for space within the mind of the young adult seizing on the ground, his attempts to ground himself in the sensations of his body writhing on the ground with futility. Both in the present moment and in his currently recalled past, a deep realization overtook the jathka – these weren’t just education for how to be a warrior – but a testament to his forebearer’s sins. Ronjah relaxed into the pain and allowed himself to finally feel what he had denied all those years ago.

  His vision collapsed again. When he returned, he was back among the flaming exterior of what was Morgoroth. The shadow had lost its intensity, piquing the prince’s curiosity. The chill softened and with it came a blood curling revelation.

  “You are one of my kind’s many offspring. One of the many sons of this prison’s co-architect.”

  Sau’ipsu. A name unknown yet utterly familiar to him. Ronjah rose from the floor – he was back at Zalmar’s base of operations. Back on Idris 7. Exhaling deeply, he looked upon the corpse of his victim.

  “Mission failed. Target could not be extracted,” he lied. “Acknowledged,” Lilith’k’s voice rang on his comm. “Extract to EP secondary.”

  Ronjah took a deep breath and looked around the room. And then at his hands. Maybe, just maybe, he could get out without a fight. He wasn’t as sure as he had been before. He wasn’t so sure that he was completely free of the creature – this Thoros that had decided to have him as its meal.

  Perhaps Itharaak would be able to help him with this ancient foe. The future of the Imperium depended on it.

  But what did the entity Sau’ipsu mean by offspring? Whose son was he? Ronjah shuddered as he loaded his sidearms in preparation for the deceased commander’s reinforcements. Cracking his neck, he walked out of the room and readied himself for the vengeful onslaught of CGA soldiers.