The King Trials 2: Beyond.

Intense light shines through the small gap. Slowly I remove my hands from my eyes, the penetrating glare weakens so I can see the earthen floor beneath my feet, veiled by a layer of sandy dust. My gaze levels and unbound shock strings my eyes wide.

“No…no, no, not this. Please not this,” I murmur.

I revolve gradually, an arctic cold flows through my veins, flooding me with bone-chattering fear. The coliseum where the Blood Games take place except right here, right now, everything is bare. The tiered stands are empty, a phantom breeze rustles the tattered wisps of the awning. The portcullis is barred shut, locked into the grooves. It’s bright out, like day, but it all feels unreal.

Everything is eerily silent. Unnaturally still.

“I have been waiting for you, tree-dangler.”

I freeze. My blood turns to ice.

I rotate with utter reluctance. Fully swivelled, I look upon a frightening figure dressed in a gladiator ensemble, his chest bare with only a metal paladin shoulder armour and a knee-length faux leather skirt with studded embellishments.

His face turned to the ground, strands of russet hair shielding his eyes. A lengthy breadth of paved ivory interspaced between it and I.

“You are not real.” My words lost by the spectral wind.

“I am as real as you are, little Hera.” His voice resounds like a phantom echo.

I brace my resolve. “You are an eidolon.”

Rimnick frees a dark chuckle as it ricochets around me like a rumbling whisper. “Call it what you want.”

“Why are you here?”

“You.” His voice like a pebble dropped in a lake. The ripple starts small, but it augments as it expands. “You brought me here. In your mind, I see it all. Your thoughts, your fears, your darkest truth.”

I flinch at the term. “I fear nothing…least of all you, you are fallen.”

“And you are falling, tree-dangler,” he says it as a dread-drilling fact. “I have seen it all, all you are capable of.”

My fingers curl at my sides. “You mean my ability to fight?”

“Your ability to kill,” he corrects, and his face glacially lifts. “Your capability of destruction.”

The scene transforms right before me. Transmuting into a harrowing scene for all my horrors to surround me. Piles of wrecked chariots are scattered, the ground strewn with its remnants. Sprawled corpses of the Spartans of Sorcia, with either halos of blood above their heads or pools of it around their bodies.

Innumerable, vacant eyes stare back at me with perpetual terror, mouths rounded. Turning again, everywhere I look, glance, pairs of eyes impale right through me. Reminding me of every blade stroke, spray of blood and agonising scream. My fists tremble, knocking against my thighs.

I steel my voice. “You accuse me as if I was the sole cause?”

A shearing gasp tears from my chest as Rimnick flashes before me. He flaunts a bloody smile, both rows equally wet, sopping with red.

“You are capable of great destruction,” he says excitedly, and he slants closer like he’s going to tell me a secret. “Do you want to know how I know, what I know to be true?”

I look up into his eyes, and they are as vacant and dead as the corpses. Exactly as they were when he was still living.

“Because there is a great darkness within you. And soon, it will have you consumed.”