Page 915

--donation bonus day (Page 1/3)--
Zeff could feel that old well filling up. In the back of his head, he could feel it. He thought it had run dry ages ago, but now he realized that every drop was still there. And now there was more.

Hatred.

That was how he’d kept himself sane the first time. He’d poured all of his anger, misery, and confusion into that dark place. And the result was the old well. Distilled and purified. A reservoir that he’d kept for Abolish. It had helped him more than a few times in the past.

It would do the same for the Vanguard, he figured. For Lawrence and Dergoz and whoever else stood in his way.

He only needed to focus. To let it all drain in there. To add it to the well. Years of meditation, of discipline, of emotional control--it all served him now.

And at length, as his head finally started to clear, Axiolis’ voice began to register again.

‘-please... it’s been over an hour... Talk to me, Zeff. Please, just say anything.’

He turned his stone gray eyes toward the reaper. But what Zeff saw made him rear back in his seat.

Axiolis was different. The reaper wasn’t a large bat with white eyes anymore--like he’d been for as long as Zeff had known him. Instead, Axiolis just looked like some kind of abominable monster--so much so that Zeff still wasn’t even certain what he was seeing.

‘...Are you okay?’ the reaper asked.

Staring, he said, “You’re not the same.”

‘...What?’

“You look... very different.”

Ax was briefly quiet. ‘Hmm. What do I look like, exactly?’

“Ah...”

‘Take your time and tell me.’

Zeff sat up straight and tried harder to understand what his eyes were telling him.

It almost looked like some kind of gnarled dragon, though decidedly more marine, what with its lithe body and dark-on-top, light-on-bottom coloration. It did have wings, but Zeff couldn’t tell how large they were, because they were kept retracted into long grooves on its back, with sections rearing up into the shape of a dorsal fin. The scaly underbelly was similar, bearing space for its thick legs and hooked claws to fold up into its chest cavity. A pair of small, twisted horns crowned its head, just above its reptilian eyes.

But it was the creature’s huge mouth that made Zeff realize what he was looking at, because just beyond the jagged teeth poking out, he noticed a few faint trails of lingering white frost.