The darkness was filled with nothing but itself. Up and down had no further meaning. They were just words. Salamander, normally radiating at least some light, was just a speck of red in the vastness of black. She looked at the hands she still had. There had been a moment where she was nothing but energy, she had become stronger, she was stronger, then her manifestation had been prevented, she had been flung into the point of original fire again. Vast fires, she was on her way back from there, she shouldn’t have this body anymore, she should have been different. Her new power was gone.

What had happened? There had been waiting. How did that even work? It wasn’t like elemental planes were just something between which things could squeeze themselves. Then again, the Lorylim probably didn’t have to obey any clear rules.

‘I guess this is them then?’ she asked herself, glaring hatefully into the Lorylim void, with the eyes that she at least still knew were still hers. She was in search of something, anything. Nothing was, just this void surrounding her. This liquid vacuum filled with only untouchable things. Untouchable, invisible, unspeakable things.

Until they no longer wanted to be nothing.

Like a mandala, eyes unfolded around Salamander. Gigantic and miniscule, eternities away and mere centimetres removed, they fit together perfectly, mirrored at times like the facets of a kaleidoscope. Exactly like that, they also moved, melding into each other, slowly spreading out of nowhere. They had irises of a weird shape, a central dot that unravelled into something like gills, like the underside of a mushroom.

The eyes started bleeding from the gills with sounds of a song too cacophonic to understand. Nothing was to comprehend what the sounds were, as the song formed itself into a perfect copy of Salamander herself. “We have waited - Izha has foretold - now we laugh - you made it here.” The copy moved her lips, but it seemed more like the widening and closing of the eyes around made the sounds. They just needed a vessel that was able to speak for them.

The incomprehensible song continued in the background. It reminded Salamander of what Undine had tried to sing when she had been corrupted, unsurprisingly, but there was a vast difference in complexity. Undine had voiced something translated into a real tongue, or at least approaching it, this was something removed from reality as such, something different. It was undecipherable, vile, made Salamander’s stomach churn with a mixture of disgust and love, for it was also beautiful.

The second she thought that, one of the eyes’ irises became a large spike, or perhaps a tusk was a more apt description, and penetrated deep into the copy’s left eye socket. It laughed.

“Join,” the copy commanded, her voice but underlined by the endless beating of seven otherworldly hearts.

“And what? Isn’t this the part where you try to convince me by giving me something I want?” Salamander asked with a disturbed grin. “Trying to pull me over by making your side seem more desirable?”

“Desire – Side – Convincing,” the eyes began to quiver and then wilt away like flower petals in an onslaught of screeching laughter as the lids closed like interlocking hands and gave birth to disturbed shapes, figures and bodies, pulsating to the beat of the willed existence of themselves. “Mistake – Izha was right – There is no use – There soon will be no you.”

“What the fuck does that even me-,” Salamander stopped dead in her words as the shapes, figures and bodies crawled under the surface of the tusk, causing it to bulge and thrive like crawling maggots itching underneath her skin and pumping into her copy.

It meant that she had miscalculated thoroughly. She had the idea that the Lorylim were something like demons in most fantasy stories her summoner was so keen of, whispering to her the things she wanted so she would side with them. They weren’t, they had no need, they weren’t a corrupting force, they were corruption itself.

There was no need to convince her of anything, no switching sides or tempting offers, that was all unnecessary. They didn’t need Salamander, they just needed a vessel. As such keeping what made her her intact was just a hassle. Easier to just rip out what she was before and replace it with what they were.

“Once we observed and did so little,” the copy told her as the corruption pulsated through Salamander. Whatever they were doing to it was deeply disturbing to Salamander; just by looking at it, the black energy drenching the cool fires of the copy, she felt weak. No, there was a mistake in what she perceived.

Knowledge, a disgusting understanding, blubbering memories, they filled her left eye. A drop, sifting through the planes, untouching to all but water. Once. A drop, shifting through all the planes, untouching to all but water. Once. A drop, travelling through all the planes, untouching to all but water. Once. A drop… a drop… a million eyes, a maddening exchange, one resolution.

A drop. Sifting through all the planes. They were the roots, they were everywhere, if the earth was the molten core, then the elemental planes wrapped around them and they…

…They were what came before. They were just bound here by the imposter. They had once been great, now they were just hatred for themselves. All was to be disregarded to spread destruction to everything else. Life was the enemy to them. All needed to die. All that they could encounter on their way.

A drop. Sifting through all the planes. Untouching all but water. She travelled the same path twice. They tore themselves apart and spread to intercept. A drop. Corrupted and sifting back to the core. Perfect.

They ripped a part out of her. Her despair was a crater, so easy to fill.

They were not an endless amount of power. Just incredibly vast.

They ripped a part out of her. Her anger was a crater, so easy to fill.

That wasn’t Undine’s story anymore.

That was hers.

“Oh, come the fuck on,” Salamander looked with a blind eye upon her undamaged copy as it spoke to her. “They don’t need your approval, but how hard could it be to give in anyway? Don’t struggle, as part of them you can set the world on fire. Burn everything, burn all that displeases you, let the dead and the living be but a fever consumed by flames.”

Salamander grinned wide. Now she understood.

“Now you understand,” Salamander grinned wide.

“Yeah,” the copy said and grabbed the head of the original. The original whose senses had been displaced, with the tusk in her eye and the corruption spreading like the plague it was through her veins. “I understand that you Lorylim are full of shit!”

“What – What – What?” If they could feel something like confusion, when the unharmed Salamander moved and ripped out the tusk, that would have been the moment they felt it. In the first place there had never been a copy, just a separate instance of herself that held the new power. The Lorylim had thrown everything into disarray, every sense didn’t make sense anymore, there was no up or down, there was no accuracy of who was who, especially not as to who of the two of herself was herself.

“You are lying, you corrupting shits,” Salamander grinned as she grabbed her own head. “Maybe you don’t need my consent to corrupt me, but it sure as hell doesn’t help you when I struggle.” She sealed the hole in her skull oozing with creatures unmistakable, with the palm of her other self. “If I just stay here, you will eventually win, but if there is no me to corrupt, you are fucked. With how much you hurt yourself just to get in my way, I count burning myself to nothing as a win!”

“Like Izha said,” one of them laughed. Then all of them laughed as the new truth applied to all of them. “Cleanse yourself – We don’t care – we always have a path.”

Were they lying again? No way to tell, no way to make certain. ‘Enough thinking, just do!’ she told herself, she was better at that anyway, just letting the instincts take over. Fire filled Salamander’s empty eye socket, filled the corruption, filled everything. She was burning herself up, because that was preferable to being corrupted by something else. The world was filled with light, pain, validation and regret.

The darkness inside her was set ablaze as she clawed onto life.

Then she felt her summoner and sisters again.

___________________________________________________________________________

John was looking up at the tainted firestorm. It had begun as a standard red thing, had been infected with eyes whirling on the surface, which had been seriously unnerving, then finally changed into a warm golden glow. That change gave him something resembling hope, and this window appearing finally made it clear that this was coming to an end. He was on the edge of his seat, ready for anything. No Corruption Level alert ever came, he thought that a good omen

The firestorm was now shrinking down. The immense heat was reduced to a bearable level and finally faded altogether as a new and reborn Salamander formed.

Her red skin had only become deeper in tone, the colour of a ripe cherry. The metal bindings that had decorated her wrists and ankles were now fully fletched pieces of armour, hiding her arms from the elbows and her legs from the kneecaps downwards in pitch black metal.

Her proportions were unchanged, still with the DD-size breasts and wide hips. The only real change in the torso department was that her flames no longer hid the bare minimum but also not a whole lot more than that. Something akin to a flaming bra and a forever flickering thong replaced the old censorious flames. Her crimson hair had become shorter, certainly very short for a woman. As it still formed, her hair was consumed by fire, like a candle flame it sat atop her head, completely revealing her short elvish ears. That fire was extinguished, leaving only a wild display of upwards standing strands.

She fell forward the moment the firestorm was gone, with John catching her at the last moment. The fire didn’t hurt his hands. Her right eye was the same as before, an iris as black as coal, but the left was different, a black sclera surrounding a dark red iris with a golden pupil.

It wouldn’t have been a proper encounter with the Lorylim, however, if Salamander hadn’t gotten herself scars. The depth of her encounter showed in them, as they didn’t stop with partly covering one side, like with Undine. Instead, her whole body was covered under black lines, with the only exception being the right side of her face. A particularly thick set of the tattoo-like marks concentrated around her left eye; as a matter of fact, it seemed like that was where the centre of it all lay.

In a way they were beautiful, they had a design to them with nodes and circles and connections, a sort of network. Perhaps the scars resulted from a sort of secondary nervous system that the Lorylim set-up inside their host and the removal of such.

John had to formulate theories like that to get away from the sadness he felt at that moment. “Was it really worth that?” he asked his elemental.

Salamander looked at herself through his eyes. “What are scars compared to vindication?” her voice was weak but as cocky as always. “I have proven myself, I could do what she couldn’t.” As the memories of what Salamander had experienced in the past time, which had only been a minute for them, flooded in, there was a deeply ashamed surge.

Undine, because she felt like she needed to, materialized on the little ship and looked down to Salamander. “You did better than me,” she told her.

“I did,” the fire spirit said and finally gathered the strength to get up. “I have no idea if I would have been able to do it if you hadn’t failed before me. Not that it matters, I didn’t…” she almost fell over again, but Undine and Sylph helped her standing, “…do this to boast. If there is even anymore doubt about it. Not to show off and certainly not to shame you.” She looked at everyone around, “I did it because I thought I had to,” she grinned, and the scars turned from black to golden before finally leaking out the fire that heated up inside the endflame elemental. “And I feel so much stronger now!”

“How great for you,” Tilgun said. “I have to raise something that will sour the mood though.”

The Gamer made a sour expression; he was just happy this whole thing had gone over with only minor damage. “What is, Tilgun?”

“That Lorylim over there,” John immediately turned his attention. Someone was standing on the water. Having appeared out of basically nowhere. No, someone was overstating it. Something would have been more accurate.

It was a humanoid form, with thin limbs and a head that forked into two horns at the tip. Its skin was black and crawling over the bones beneath, continuously, as if it was made from a million maggots. A singular eye between the horns was the only thing that was unmoving about its exterior. Its voice was that of a sickly young man, gargling with throat infections, and left no mouth but instead some sort of gills that made up its visible rib cage.

“Who am I, who are we, we are one, the first, the next, the ones breaking into beyond,” the thing spoke. “See my name, you can’t not, can you?”