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Description
Smiffy lay unconscious on an examination table, an oxygen mask over his face and an IV stuck in his arm, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and sweatpants. He hadn't woken up since they found him, frozen and screaming on the edge of the Farlands.

Trott sat at his desk in the corner of the room, staring down a microscope and fiddling with several machines. He was examining the blood that Smiffy had been coughing up for the past few hours. When this kept happening, however, Trott took a scan of his chest and was now waiting for the images to develop.

Ross sat in a chair next to the table, quietly talking to Smiffy and trying to get him to wake up. He was worried, because his friend was pale and sweaty and shaking. It looked like he was struggling to breathe, even with the oxygen mask on.

He was muttering in his sleep. It took Ross a minute, but he finally realized what he was saying.

He was saying “void.”

This continued for another half hour until the sun rose. That was when Smiffy finally stirred. He shifted a bit and slowly blinked his eyes open, looking dazed and confused and feverish.

“R-Ross...?” he mumbled, his voice weak and hoarse. “Wha-... what happened...?”

“You were sleepwalking, mate,” said Ross. “You ended up in the Farlanders village. Nearly froze to death though...”

Smiffy thought back, but the memories from the event were hazy. He remembered cold and pain and especially fear. However, just when he managed to catch a glimpse of the shadowy red being that had haunted him, a crippling jolt of pain shot through his chest, and he grimaced, unable to breathe for a moment.

“What's wrong?” asked Ross, suddenly sounding frantic.

“It hurts...” he choked out, one hand clutching his chest and the other hand gripping the edge of the table.

“There's a good reason for that,” said Trott, sounding unusually somber as he stood on the other side of the table Smiffy was lying on. He was holding a piece of paper.

“What's that...?” asked Smiffy quietly.

Trott didn't make eye contact with him. “While you were asleep, I did a scan to see if I could find out why you couldn't breathe and why you were coughing up blood... This is what I found.”

He handed the paper to Smiffy. The image showed his ribcage and lungs, but something wasn't right. There were unnatural black growths stretching like veins all over his lungs.

“What is this...?” he choked out, staring at the image.

Trott sighed. “I uh... I analyzed the blood you were coughing up, and I found traces of flux.”

Smiffy and Ross looked up at him, horrified.

“There's flux growing in your lungs like a cancer,” said Trott, doing his best to repress his emotions. “It appears to be malignant... and it's growing faster than anything I've seen. Optimistically, we have about a week to find a cure.”

“Before what...?” asked Smiffy, his voice low. However, before Trott could answer, he looked down and lifted his shirt. He saw that the black lightning scars around the stitched-up wound on his chest were gone, but the purple ones had spread. He should have known...

“Before it reaches your heart and kills you...” spat out Trott, unable to stop his voice from cracking this time. He had no idea how other doctors were able to deliver this news on a regular basis.

Ross sat in horrified silence, waiting to see how Smiffy would react. He expected his friend to be upset, of course, but he didn't expect him to get angry.

Smiffy sat up, crying out at the pain. Then, before Trott or Ross could stop him, he pulled out his IV and took off the mask. Then he stood up, nearly collapsed from the pain, and then regained his footing before either of his friends could help. He stormed over to the elevator and zapped up to his lab, Ross and Trott right behind him.

They watched uncertainly as Smiffy stormed over to his desk and angrily started flipping through a book.

“Here,” he said, finding the page he needed. “This should cure it, right Trott?” He shoved the book in Trott's face, allowing him to see a recipe for some sort of medicinal paste made using an ethereal bloom.

“This... this could actually work...” said Trott in amazement. “Wait, do you have everything you need to make it?”

“Nope. And that's where you two come in,” he said, taking the book back. “Trott, I need you to go out and find as many Shimmerleaf flowers as possible. Ross, take this –” he threw a small golden bag at him – “and go get as much taint stuff as you can.”

“Won't I get poisoned too?” asked Ross nervously.

“You're a lycanthrope,” grumbled Smiffy. “You're immune to pretty much anything that isn't silver.”

“But we'll both be gone,” said Trott. “What if you need something?”

“I can handle myself,” Smiffy growled, refusing to believe there was anything wrong with him, even though simply standing was causing him a tremendous amount of pain. He heard Ross and Trott talking to him, but he didn't respond. After a few minutes of the cold shoulder, they left.

When he heard them leave, he turned around to look, and he saw that Trott had left an emergency air tank and oxygen mask right next to his desk. He quickly went over and used it, grateful that his friends didn't have to see his weakness.

XXX

Trott had several major difficulties finding the flowers Smiffy needed. Not only were they rare to begin with, but the sudden wave of freezing cold weather seemed to have diminished their numbers even further.

He had no idea what was happening with the weather, but he knew it started the day Smiffy was infected after being hit by the lightning.

Trott flew around for the majority of the day until he finally found three Shimmerleaf flowers. He just hoped it was enough.

As he flew back, he ran into Ross, who was cut and bruised from fighting various flux monsters. Together, they walked back to the Marble Tower. When they crossed the drawbridge, they noticed that the moat had frozen over. And when they went inside and traveled upstairs to Smiffy's workshop, they found him upright and working as if everything was fine. He was even dressed properly, wearing his normal attire minus the jacket and vest. He claimed that the pain had faded.

Trott knew better, though. He saw that Smiffy had used up most of the tank while they had been gone, and he saw the bottles of pain medication on his desk. He could even see that his friend was slowly becoming more translucent, which only happened under very bad and very extreme circumstances.

When he brought this up, however, Smiffy became completely closed off. When Trott suggested he lay down or eat something, he shot lightning at his feet.

This became a recurring pattern over the following two days.

Smiffy spent all of his time in his workshop and no time resting. Over the course of those two days, he attempted to synthesize a cure, but it was difficult magic. Throughout those days, Ross or Trott would come and tell him he needed to eat or sleep, and he would shoot lightning at their feet until the left.

What they didn't know was that he couldn't eat or sleep. Instead of spreading slowly and normally like flux usually does, his cancerous form of flux had grown up into his throat and was choking him. He couldn't breathe while he was laying down, and he couldn't swallow solid food either. Even water was a struggle.

The longer he worked and the less he slept, the harder it was to breathe. Finally, on the second night of his search for the cure, everything seemed to catch up to him.

Ross had come to check on him. It was late, and he was worried. However, instead of waltzing into the room and trying to give Smiffy an ultimatum like Trott had been doing, he hid in the elevator and watched.

Smiffy seemed to be moving normally, but his movements were slowed and looked painful. Suddenly, something went wrong, and Smiffy dropped like a sack of marble. Ross ran to him and quickly moved him into an upright position so that he would be able to breathe. When he did this, however, he saw the full extent of how sick his friend was.

His skin was mostly translucent now, and he was shaking in pain and gasping for breath. The top half of his shirt was unbuttoned, and because he was so transparent, Ross could see the dark masses of solid flux sitting heavily in upper chest and throat.

Ross shook his head a bit before picking Smiffy up. He gave a small grunt of distress, looking like he wanted to fight but was too weak.

“Easy mate,” said Ross quietly as he carried his friend to the elevator. “You're exhausted. You need some sleep.”

“Can't...” he choked out, weakly clutching his throat.

“Don't worry,” he said, his voice soft. “We'll make sure you keep breathing...”

Smiffy couldn't even come up with a reply before the exhaustion and pain overcame him.

XXX

He woke up the next morning in his bed, propped upright with a needle stuck in his arm. There was an oxygen mask over his face again, but he knew that wasn't what kept him breathing while he slept. He looked around, first noticing the chair next to his bed. Somebody had kept watch over him.

The next thing he noticed was the tube on the table. It was long and thin and attached to an air pump. It was covered with blood and clumps of flux. That was the thing that had kept him breathing, that had pumped air directly into his lungs courtesy of the tube fed down his throat. He was glad they had taken it out before he woke up.

Glancing down, he pulled his shirt open a bit and saw through his transparent skin that the flux had spread even further to the point where his lungs were almost completely encased. It hadn't even tried to go for his heart yet, but he could feel that it had advanced further up his neck to the point where it was just at his jaw. It was almost like he could taste it.

Painfully, he sat upright. He pulled the IV out of his arm – a dangerous habit that he knew he shouldn't get into – and he took off the mask. At this point, it made no difference whether he wore it or not. He could barely breathe either way. Then he clambered out of bed, put his shoes on, and forced himself to walk upright as he made his way over to the elevator and down to his workshop.

He worked all day, fighting against his own body. He kept a mirror on his desk so he could see how far the flux was spreading. By the time the sun was starting to set, it had spread up the back of his neck and was running up the back of his head.

Trott and Ross came by nearly every thirty minutes on the dot to check on him. That was when he stopped lying.

He stopped telling them he was fine. He told them how much pain he was in and how he could barely take in enough air to talk. But he told them he was so close to a cure. He told them he needed to focus or he would be dead by midnight.

After that, they kept checking on him, but they didn't say anything. They just stopped by to make sure he was still conscious and breathing.

It happened at sunset.

Smiffy stood next to his cauldron, holding his last Shimmerleaf flower. The others had been destroyed by his failure to create an Ethereal bloom. This was his last chance.

He double checked the recipe. He triple checked it. He made sure everything was right, because this time his life depended on it. Then he threw the ingredients into the cauldron.

And then a second later he was holding an Ethereal bloom. He would have screamed if he had still been able to use his vocal cords.

Quickly carrying the precious flower over to his workbench, he began the procedure of liquifying it. He wouldn't be able to swallow it though – he needed to inject it. He ground the flower into a fine powder and poured it into a small glass jar. Then he cast a simple spell over the powder, and it slowly began to turn to liquid.

Knowing the process would take several minutes, he capped the bottle and set it on his desk. The worst thing to happen now would be for him to spill it or knock the bottle over, so he stepped to the other side of the room. He paced back and forth in front of the window, looking out at the sunset and ignoring the feeling that his chest was imploding. It wouldn't matter soon.

Suddenly, he heard a small chiming noise, and he looked over and saw that the cure had been synthesized. The bright blue liquid in the jar seemed to glow even from across the room.

He took one step towards it when everything went wrong.

He suddenly collapsed, freezing cold and completely unable to breathe. He could barely move.

Shaking, he grabbed the mirror and looked in it, watching in horror as veins of flux appeared around his eyes. A split second later, something even worse happened. The whites of his eyes turned black, and his irises and pupils became a solid glowing red.

Suddenly, he convulsed and started coughing up blood. The seizure was so violent that he dropped the mirror, shattering it. He couldn't scream. He couldn't move. He no longer had control over his body.

And then he was still and calm. He breathed deeply through now fully functional lungs.

Smiffy was gone.

Void had taken over.

XXX

Trott and Ross came running in only a minute later, alerted by the sound of the mirror shattering.

Smiffy had gone. Trott saw the tiny bottle of liquid cure sitting on his desk, so he quickly picked it up and pocketed it.

“Trott...” Ross choked out from the other side of the room.

The walrus quickly came over and was shocked to see a bloody shattered mirror laying on the ground.

And then he saw what Ross was staring at.

There was a very familiar spiral drawn on the wall. And it was drawn in blood.

Description
Smiffy lay unconscious on an examination table, an oxygen mask over his face and an IV stuck in his arm, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and sweatpants. He hadn't woken up since they found him, frozen and screaming on the edge of the Farlands.

Trott sat at his desk in the corner of the room, staring down a microscope and fiddling with several machines. He was examining the blood that Smiffy had been coughing up for the past few hours. When this kept happening, however, Trott took a scan of his chest and was now waiting for the images to develop.

Ross sat in a chair next to the table, quietly talking to Smiffy and trying to get him to wake up. He was worried, because his friend was pale and sweaty and shaking. It looked like he was struggling to breathe, even with the oxygen mask on.

He was muttering in his sleep. It took Ross a minute, but he finally realized what he was saying.

He was saying “void.”

This continued for another half hour until the sun rose. That was when Smiffy finally stirred. He shifted a bit and slowly blinked his eyes open, looking dazed and confused and feverish.

“R-Ross...?” he mumbled, his voice weak and hoarse. “Wha-... what happened...?”

“You were sleepwalking, mate,” said Ross. “You ended up in the Farlanders village. Nearly froze to death though...”

Smiffy thought back, but the memories from the event were hazy. He remembered cold and pain and especially fear. However, just when he managed to catch a glimpse of the shadowy red being that had haunted him, a crippling jolt of pain shot through his chest, and he grimaced, unable to breathe for a moment.

“What's wrong?” asked Ross, suddenly sounding frantic.

“It hurts...” he choked out, one hand clutching his chest and the other hand gripping the edge of the table.

“There's a good reason for that,” said Trott, sounding unusually somber as he stood on the other side of the table Smiffy was lying on. He was holding a piece of paper.

“What's that...?” asked Smiffy quietly.

Trott didn't make eye contact with him. “While you were asleep, I did a scan to see if I could find out why you couldn't breathe and why you were coughing up blood... This is what I found.”

He handed the paper to Smiffy. The image showed his ribcage and lungs, but something wasn't right. There were unnatural black growths stretching like veins all over his lungs.

“What is this...?” he choked out, staring at the image.

Trott sighed. “I uh... I analyzed the blood you were coughing up, and I found traces of flux.”

Smiffy and Ross looked up at him, horrified.

“There's flux growing in your lungs like a cancer,” said Trott, doing his best to repress his emotions. “It appears to be malignant... and it's growing faster than anything I've seen. Optimistically, we have about a week to find a cure.”

“Before what...?” asked Smiffy, his voice low. However, before Trott could answer, he looked down and lifted his shirt. He saw that the black lightning scars around the stitched-up wound on his chest were gone, but the purple ones had spread. He should have known...

“Before it reaches your heart and kills you...” spat out Trott, unable to stop his voice from cracking this time. He had no idea how other doctors were able to deliver this news on a regular basis.

Ross sat in horrified silence, waiting to see how Smiffy would react. He expected his friend to be upset, of course, but he didn't expect him to get angry.

Smiffy sat up, crying out at the pain. Then, before Trott or Ross could stop him, he pulled out his IV and took off the mask. Then he stood up, nearly collapsed from the pain, and then regained his footing before either of his friends could help. He stormed over to the elevator and zapped up to his lab, Ross and Trott right behind him.

They watched uncertainly as Smiffy stormed over to his desk and angrily started flipping through a book.

“Here,” he said, finding the page he needed. “This should cure it, right Trott?” He shoved the book in Trott's face, allowing him to see a recipe for some sort of medicinal paste made using an ethereal bloom.

“This... this could actually work...” said Trott in amazement. “Wait, do you have everything you need to make it?”

“Nope. And that's where you two come in,” he said, taking the book back. “Trott, I need you to go out and find as many Shimmerleaf flowers as possible. Ross, take this –” he threw a small golden bag at him – “and go get as much taint stuff as you can.”

“Won't I get poisoned too?” asked Ross nervously.

“You're a lycanthrope,” grumbled Smiffy. “You're immune to pretty much anything that isn't silver.”

“But we'll both be gone,” said Trott. “What if you need something?”

“I can handle myself,” Smiffy growled, refusing to believe there was anything wrong with him, even though simply standing was causing him a tremendous amount of pain. He heard Ross and Trott talking to him, but he didn't respond. After a few minutes of the cold shoulder, they left.

When he heard them leave, he turned around to look, and he saw that Trott had left an emergency air tank and oxygen mask right next to his desk. He quickly went over and used it, grateful that his friends didn't have to see his weakness.

XXX

Trott had several major difficulties finding the flowers Smiffy needed. Not only were they rare to begin with, but the sudden wave of freezing cold weather seemed to have diminished their numbers even further.

He had no idea what was happening with the weather, but he knew it started the day Smiffy was infected after being hit by the lightning.

Trott flew around for the majority of the day until he finally found three Shimmerleaf flowers. He just hoped it was enough.

As he flew back, he ran into Ross, who was cut and bruised from fighting various flux monsters. Together, they walked back to the Marble Tower. When they crossed the drawbridge, they noticed that the moat had frozen over. And when they went inside and traveled upstairs to Smiffy's workshop, they found him upright and working as if everything was fine. He was even dressed properly, wearing his normal attire minus the jacket and vest. He claimed that the pain had faded.

Trott knew better, though. He saw that Smiffy had used up most of the tank while they had been gone, and he saw the bottles of pain medication on his desk. He could even see that his friend was slowly becoming more translucent, which only happened under very bad and very extreme circumstances.

When he brought this up, however, Smiffy became completely closed off. When Trott suggested he lay down or eat something, he shot lightning at his feet.

This became a recurring pattern over the following two days.

Smiffy spent all of his time in his workshop and no time resting. Over the course of those two days, he attempted to synthesize a cure, but it was difficult magic. Throughout those days, Ross or Trott would come and tell him he needed to eat or sleep, and he would shoot lightning at their feet until the left.

What they didn't know was that he couldn't eat or sleep. Instead of spreading slowly and normally like flux usually does, his cancerous form of flux had grown up into his throat and was choking him. He couldn't breathe while he was laying down, and he couldn't swallow solid food either. Even water was a struggle.

The longer he worked and the less he slept, the harder it was to breathe. Finally, on the second night of his search for the cure, everything seemed to catch up to him.

Ross had come to check on him. It was late, and he was worried. However, instead of waltzing into the room and trying to give Smiffy an ultimatum like Trott had been doing, he hid in the elevator and watched.

Smiffy seemed to be moving normally, but his movements were slowed and looked painful. Suddenly, something went wrong, and Smiffy dropped like a sack of marble. Ross ran to him and quickly moved him into an upright position so that he would be able to breathe. When he did this, however, he saw the full extent of how sick his friend was.

His skin was mostly translucent now, and he was shaking in pain and gasping for breath. The top half of his shirt was unbuttoned, and because he was so transparent, Ross could see the dark masses of solid flux sitting heavily in upper chest and throat.

Ross shook his head a bit before picking Smiffy up. He gave a small grunt of distress, looking like he wanted to fight but was too weak.

“Easy mate,” said Ross quietly as he carried his friend to the elevator. “You're exhausted. You need some sleep.”

“Can't...” he choked out, weakly clutching his throat.

“Don't worry,” he said, his voice soft. “We'll make sure you keep breathing...”

Smiffy couldn't even come up with a reply before the exhaustion and pain overcame him.

XXX

He woke up the next morning in his bed, propped upright with a needle stuck in his arm. There was an oxygen mask over his face again, but he knew that wasn't what kept him breathing while he slept. He looked around, first noticing the chair next to his bed. Somebody had kept watch over him.

The next thing he noticed was the tube on the table. It was long and thin and attached to an air pump. It was covered with blood and clumps of flux. That was the thing that had kept him breathing, that had pumped air directly into his lungs courtesy of the tube fed down his throat. He was glad they had taken it out before he woke up.

Glancing down, he pulled his shirt open a bit and saw through his transparent skin that the flux had spread even further to the point where his lungs were almost completely encased. It hadn't even tried to go for his heart yet, but he could feel that it had advanced further up his neck to the point where it was just at his jaw. It was almost like he could taste it.

Painfully, he sat upright. He pulled the IV out of his arm – a dangerous habit that he knew he shouldn't get into – and he took off the mask. At this point, it made no difference whether he wore it or not. He could barely breathe either way. Then he clambered out of bed, put his shoes on, and forced himself to walk upright as he made his way over to the elevator and down to his workshop.

He worked all day, fighting against his own body. He kept a mirror on his desk so he could see how far the flux was spreading. By the time the sun was starting to set, it had spread up the back of his neck and was running up the back of his head.

Trott and Ross came by nearly every thirty minutes on the dot to check on him. That was when he stopped lying.

He stopped telling them he was fine. He told them how much pain he was in and how he could barely take in enough air to talk. But he told them he was so close to a cure. He told them he needed to focus or he would be dead by midnight.

After that, they kept checking on him, but they didn't say anything. They just stopped by to make sure he was still conscious and breathing.

It happened at sunset.

Smiffy stood next to his cauldron, holding his last Shimmerleaf flower. The others had been destroyed by his failure to create an Ethereal bloom. This was his last chance.

He double checked the recipe. He triple checked it. He made sure everything was right, because this time his life depended on it. Then he threw the ingredients into the cauldron.

And then a second later he was holding an Ethereal bloom. He would have screamed if he had still been able to use his vocal cords.

Quickly carrying the precious flower over to his workbench, he began the procedure of liquifying it. He wouldn't be able to swallow it though – he needed to inject it. He ground the flower into a fine powder and poured it into a small glass jar. Then he cast a simple spell over the powder, and it slowly began to turn to liquid.

Knowing the process would take several minutes, he capped the bottle and set it on his desk. The worst thing to happen now would be for him to spill it or knock the bottle over, so he stepped to the other side of the room. He paced back and forth in front of the window, looking out at the sunset and ignoring the feeling that his chest was imploding. It wouldn't matter soon.

Suddenly, he heard a small chiming noise, and he looked over and saw that the cure had been synthesized. The bright blue liquid in the jar seemed to glow even from across the room.

He took one step towards it when everything went wrong.

He suddenly collapsed, freezing cold and completely unable to breathe. He could barely move.

Shaking, he grabbed the mirror and looked in it, watching in horror as veins of flux appeared around his eyes. A split second later, something even worse happened. The whites of his eyes turned black, and his irises and pupils became a solid glowing red.

Suddenly, he convulsed and started coughing up blood. The seizure was so violent that he dropped the mirror, shattering it. He couldn't scream. He couldn't move. He no longer had control over his body.

And then he was still and calm. He breathed deeply through now fully functional lungs.

Smiffy was gone.

Void had taken over.

XXX

Trott and Ross came running in only a minute later, alerted by the sound of the mirror shattering.

Smiffy had gone. Trott saw the tiny bottle of liquid cure sitting on his desk, so he quickly picked it up and pocketed it.

“Trott...” Ross choked out from the other side of the room.

The walrus quickly came over and was shocked to see a bloody shattered mirror laying on the ground.

And then he saw what Ross was staring at.

There was a very familiar spiral drawn on the wall. And it was drawn in blood.