I watched on as the two golden glowing lights that had split grew farther in distance from one another. One to the left towards the school, the last to the front gate on the right.

“Let me ask you something watch…does the night end, and I succeed on the quest of ‘surviving’ a night if I follow Tom?”

Several seconds passed by.

*ding* 

‘Boon of MYSTERY: The time grows near. Make a DECISION on what perspective to follow.

Quest: Follow Tom to the church, and fight off purgatory’s grasp on his life, alongside the attack of the mysterious spirit amalgamation curse, the future will change accordingly to your outside influence while not being known to TOM.

Quest: Survive the rest of the night within the school with the students, your decisions and interactions with them will truly have them killed if they die in this scenario. The occurences of the future will change accordingly. For every life you save, another must die.’

“Malevolent fucking gods” I couldn’t stop my mouth from dropping, this was new, ‘Why did it have to say some of that in caps…yeesh…’

“I’m sorry boon of mystery…I really am” Rubbing my neck I looked up at the rain in search of some answer.

*ding*

‘Boon of mystery: Make a choice on that in which person to follow, the time you knew will change within the choices you make. Be careful not in your choice, but that in which you do after you have chosen the path to take. Think wisely.

Quest: Follow Tom to the church, where he will find the secrets that inhabit the lands. The well is merely one door of several to the land of purgatory.

Quest: Follow those that fight the spirit of the amalgamation curse, their actions will either prevent, once the opening of the door within the well, or with your assistance seal it forever. This comes at the cost of the lives already lost within the dark dwellings of the abyssal well.’

“Thank you…” ‘But also…does it respond to my attitude? I need to be more careful when I voice an opinion…’

Though the ‘options’ were different each time it was actually conveying information. That’s when I realized, I hadn’t received a reward from the previous Boon of Mystery add on to my quest. That must have been it. Information.

The decision, albeit slightly differently put then the previous quests was still the same quests.

It would seem it formatted the quests within the perspective that I took on as a person to the situations, and thus through a ‘soft touch’ the choices confer also a deeper understanding if I so chose to ask.

‘Rather…that mysterious fucking boon has a mind of its own and its toying with me’

“Either way…that also means that the ‘door’?... within the well, can still be prevented from opening, I think by helping Tom I will stand a greater chance in the long run but…something still doesn’t feel right…” I looked over to the golden light that was on the precipice of the entrance to the school grounds. 

“Tom…you better feel lucky your guardian angel chose you” Is that the right way to put it?

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Tom left the school compound under the veil of darkness, long before the sun even considered returning. The plan had to be set in motion—urgency whispered from every corner of the compound, even I knew that. After his final conversation with his friends that morning, he had gathered himself and stepped into the void of night, each footfall heavier than the last. The front gate clanked shut behind him like a judge’s gavel sealing fate.

"For them… for them…" he whispered to himself. The tremor in his voice betrayed how hollow those words had become.

From the shadows, I watched. His resolve, though burdened, cracked through now and again—flickers of will cutting against the dense fog of fear. Tom had left the gate slightly ajar in his distracted state, walking forward before realizing and circling back to close it. There was determination in him, yes, but also something else—something raw. I knew he wasn’t truly alone, but he didn’t. That distinction was everything.

The two elders weren’t anywhere nearby, confirming that I had landed not in some synchronized moment of the present, but deeper—this was a fractured wedge of the past. A loop, maybe. I had been hurled backward by something far beyond comprehension, and the days I’d spent in the school? Suspended somewhere between existence and recurrence.

Things weren’t adding up, and that disturbed me more than the dark.

‘The curse… the upheaval… the temporal displacement... none of this is coincidental,’ I thought, the gears in my head refusing to still. ‘This isn’t just a ghost story. It’s something... recursive. Like a phonograph with a crack in its disc. It skips, goes back, and plays again, trying to correct itself—but never quite does.’

Tom moved through the village with careful, hunted steps. The silence around him wasn’t quiet—it was pressed down like a shroud, unnatural and too deep. He stopped by a shop labeled in hand-painted wood: Talisman & Spirit Protection. The bell didn’t ring when he opened the door. I noted that.

He left with a pouch of items, likely charms and trinkets barely able to fend off wind, let alone a spirit. Still, he pressed eastward. I followed like a drifting ghost, one of many I had stalked through the fog-choked corridors of the Abyss. The difference here? The rain didn’t howl—it whispered. Light sprinkles pattered over Tom’s shoulders, and the world felt... hushed. Suspended.

He began to run.

Not out of fear, but with the desperate speed of someone trying to outrun hopelessness.

Lightning runes sparked across my hands as I leapt branch to branch behind him, the cape shifting like a broken second skin. The wings helped, but they still didn’t feel like mine—not yet. Pushing against air was one thing. Precision and grace? Another entirely.

Tom’s legs gave out beneath him after some hours. Knees hit dirt. The forest pressed in. He gasped against the hush of trees. As he scrambled upright, he pulled together a small pile of branches and sparked a fire to life.

Orange light danced on his features, illuminating a face strung together by sheer will. Tears slipped freely. He didn’t wipe them. He wasn’t even ashamed. Maybe he didn’t even notice.

I watched from the brush, smoke curling from the cigarette perched between my fingers.

‘Poor bastard... kid’s stronger than I was when I first came through.’

He didn’t have powers, a plan, or even hope. Just stubborn defiance and a promise to people he loved.

I retrieved the old lantern from the ring on my belt and crouched low. Digging a small hollow, I nestled it into the earth and dusted it with dirt to make it look half-forgotten. Then, with a practiced flick, I tossed a small rock into the brush near his fire.

His sniffles ceased. Stick in hand, he crept forward like a soldier facing a firing squad. Nothing waited around the tree but the lantern—battered, talisman dangling off its brass lip, its rounded body still faintly etched with patterns even I couldn’t decipher.

“Huh…” he murmured, eyes narrowing. I could see him trying to understand it. That strange curiosity. The same way I’d looked at it, once.

He carried it back to the fire, flipping it over in his hands, searching it with fingers rubbed raw from his march. And then, as his thumb passed over the base, the fire dimmed—as if the flame itself had bowed in reverence.

He flinched, nearly dropped it.

From the shadows, I grinned. “That’s it.”

Frog popped into my hand from a swirl of mist. I held him aloft, showing him the fire-lit scene.

“See? A little trickery never hurts.”

Tom’s brow furrowed. No wind stirred. No storm threatened. And yet the lantern now glowed—soft and pulsing. He flipped it over, seeking inscriptions, brushing the top and sides for some kind of mechanical trick. There wasn’t one. And when his fingers grazed the base again, the campfire hissed out entirely.

The lantern roared to life.

A bloom of light burst forth from its bowl, bathing Tom in soft illumination, golden and clean. He coughed in surprise, blinking as if seeing a miracle. Because to him, it was.

“A light…” he whispered, voice cracking.

I leaned in, barely audible over the breeze.

“A light in the darkness,” he repeated, again and again, like a prayer pulled from the mouth of a child who’d seen death but still believed in angels.

A smile found its way onto my face. The lantern had done more than guide his path—it had sparked something within him. Not faith in gods, not in charms or mysticism. But belief in the idea that he could make it.

The kid clutched it like it was sacred.

Then, to my complete bewilderment, he bowed his head.

“Little spirit,” he murmured, “I ask sincerely to use your vessel in my time of need. And when I have fulfilled my quest, I shall lift the talisman and release you from your cage. I beg of you.”

Even Frog looked surprised.

I chuckled softly.

‘You’ve got the wrong idea, Tom... but I like your style.’

The lantern didn’t flicker. And that seemed to be all the confirmation he needed.

He set it by the fire and began rekindling the flames, gently adjusting the base of the lantern to dim its radiance until it hovered like a faint ember, a watchful eye in the gloom.

It had worked. Not because of magic. But because in a world where horror crawled beneath floorboards and shadows whispered with teeth, the simple act of believing in something—anything—was a weapon.

Maybe... that was more powerful than most spells I'd ever seen. Malcolm wouldn’t have even known what he did for this kid by giving me that thing. I’d get it back, I would, but for now I didn’t mind hope being on loan.

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Tom had fallen asleep beside the dwindling fire, his arms curled protectively around the lantern, its ember glow casting slow, syrupy shadows over the forest floor. The kind of warmth only the desperate could find comfort in. He slept soundlessly, unaware of the weight I carried watching over him, of the chill that hadn’t left me since this all began.

I remained crouched just beyond the fire’s reach, surrounded by a forest that felt older than it had any right to be. Trees bowed not just from time, but from the pressure of something that gnawed quietly at the veil between here and somewhere darker.

Spirit amalgamation…
The thought rolled through my mind with the slow, smoldering drag of a cigarette. Flick. A dull ember bloomed to life in my cupped hands, and smoke leaked past my lips like a whisper into the dark. It twisted through the air, caught the moonlight in ribbons, then vanished into the ether as if even the shadows were reluctant to hold it.

I thought of the term—spirit amalgamation curse. Not just an amalgamation, not merely a haunting. The word curse hadn’t been tacked on as an afterthought—it was the core of it. A living, breathing hex that no longer needed a caster. It had become sentient, feeding, growing.

This wasn't like the undead amalgamations I’d seen in the Abyss—those twisted wrecks of sinew and bone grafted together like meat puzzles by dark arts. No, this thing didn’t need a body. It was feeding on essence, on grief, on memory.

I stared out into the trees, smoke trailing from my lips, and asked myself a question I didn’t want the answer to.

Why hadn’t the students seen the five spirits before?

Even when my quests had updated, they never referred to the five as separate beings. Only the curse. The entity. The presence.

It didn’t differentiate between source and symptom—because the two had become one.

The chill started in my ankles and crawled up, not like wind, but like intent. As if invisible fingers reached from the soil and slipped under my coat. That creeping dread, the kind that made your skin feel too small for your body.

This wasn’t a vengeful spirit. This wasn’t someone who died wronged and wanted justice. Or rather, the perception and intent of that.

The curse itself had taken on life.

*Whoosh*

A wind kicked up out of nowhere, biting through the trees like it had teeth, stripping the warmth from the fire’s edge and smothering the moonlight above us with sudden clouds, thick and bruised. The trees didn’t sway—they braced. And for a moment, the world held its breath.

Whack!

“Ow—what the fu…”

Tom jerked upright, his hand pressed to his forehead where something small and sharp had struck him. A rock? A warning? His eyes darted around, wide and glossy from disrupted sleep.

Then his hand lowered instinctively to the lantern still held tight against his chest. He could feel it too—the cold that didn’t belong to the air. The kind that wanted the flame. The wind licked at the fire like it had a tongue, like it knew how to devour slowly, deliberately, with cruel patience.

“It’s… started,” he muttered, and tossed a handful of sticks onto the fire. Sparks scattered upward in protest, but the blaze held—for now.

In the dark, I exhaled through clenched teeth. The smoke lingered between my fingers like a ghost unwilling to leave. I reached beneath my coat and closed my hand around the pistol hidden against my ribs, the familiar weight grounding me. I had been sucking on the Eternal Cigarette endlessly now. It didn’t hoarse my throat, I almost couldn’t go without it now. Enigma had added something to this I just knew it.

I didn’t look at it—I didn’t need to. One eye stayed on Tom. The other stayed on the trees, on the places where shadow didn’t quite behave the way it should.

I flicked the ember off the cigarette and slipped the filter into my breast pocket. No time to enjoy the habit. Not when the night was about to bare its teeth.