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These feelings. This space. Hector didn’t know what to expect. There was a certain strangeness here, too. It felt at once like a place that was deeply personal to him and yet also entirely foreign.

A dread came over him. A desire to turn back. To stop searching.

He didn’t listen to it. Couldn’t. There was something here that he needed to find. But he couldn’t tell if it was even something about himself or not. Some long, lost memory. Some kind of suppressed terror.

Or something entirely different. Something outside of himself.

Something that wanted in.

That thought gave him pause.

On the staircase, he stopped. He still couldn’t see the bottom. Couldn’t feel it yet. Maybe it didn’t even have one. Maybe it would just continue down forever, until he drove himself mad.

Hmm.

That could be a danger, too, he supposed. Madness. It had been on his mind more and more, of late. With everything going on, everything messing with his thoughts, his memories, his sense of self.

Ah...

Wait a moment.

Yes. That was the real reason he’d been finding so much extra motivation to meditate, recently.

Madness. Or rather, his worry over it. His deepest, most horrified worry.

With all the new memories granted to him by the Forge, all the history that he had been able to bear witness to in such an immersive, intimate way--the problem of madness was now much more concerning to him than it ever was before. Certainly more than he’d ever let on.

More than he’d ever realized, even.

He stayed there on the staircase for a long while. He looked up and felt another surge of fear arrive as he still saw only darkness. The hole through which he had descended, it was gone.

No.

Not quite.

It was only just visible, he realized. The faintest glint of light remained up there. He had to strain to see it. To feel it. But it was still there.

Himself. Who he was.

Yes.

That was what this place was, he realized. There was indeed no bottom to this hole. To keep descending would be folly.

And yet, suddenly, as he began to feel so deeply that all of these things were the truth, there arrived something new. Despite so much oppressive fear, such overwhelming dread, there was now also... a certain... longing.

Curiosity.

A desire to learn more, in spite of everything.

A dark temptation.

And somehow... that feeling made Hector understand this place even better.