Julia blinked rapidly, trying to figure out why it looked the same whether her eyes were open or closed. It hit her suddenly—that dream. The darkness. The eye. For some reason, she could remember it perfectly now. In the waking world, that dream had devolved to just a shadow in her memory.

  Lights flashed in her periphery and she shifted her attention. She stared, mouth agape, at what had to be an enormous battle. It was a little difficult to tell, honestly. Julia found that she had trouble making the shapes out, as they shifted constantly on top of being difficult to look at. They seemed to do some kind of…psychic damage to her just from looking. It made her eyes and brain tired.

  Lights flashed as enormous creatures fought. There were huge, amorphous creatures of shifting flesh that became eyes that became tentacles that became mouths and went back to flesh. These were in battle with a gigantic lizard of some sort.

  She didn’t want to let her love of stories cloud her judgment, but it looked suspiciously like how the dragons in her stories were described—huge, scaled body, gigantic bat-like wings, long neck ending in a predator’s head filled with sharp teeth.

  There were smaller creatures similar to the larger amorphous one that had gigantic eyeballs occupying a majority of their bodies in battle with humanoid winged things wielding some kind of ranged weapon. These weapons launched colorful bolts of…some kind of energy that turned the creatures they hit into mush.

  And at opposite ends of the field of battle from each other were two immense shapes. One she recognized; it was the eye—the violet one with many pupils. It seemed to be on the side of the gargantuan dragon thing and the winged humanoids.

  The other side contained a…mass. That was the only way she could think of it. It was an immense mass of shifting flesh and darkness. Shapes constantly formed and reformed and broke down—over and over.

  Julia was entranced by the battle, so much so that she didn’t even notice the creature that was standing right next to her until it spoke.

  “Rather impressive, is it not?”

  She jumped and spun around into a combat stance, only realizing she had no weapon when she went to draw it. Actually, she couldn’t feel her body at all. She still had a sense of herself in space—she definitely felt herself spin around to face the newcomer—but she had no physical form to back it up, apparently.

  “Apologies for startling you, Julia. I figured I would provide you some company since you’ll likely be here for a while this time. The others are all busy, as you can see,” he said, motioning to the battle raging far in the distance.

  “You…know me?” Julia asked cautiously. She relaxed out of her battle stance—seeing as she didn’t seem to actually have a body anyway.

  “Of course—we all know you. You’re quite popular out here, you know,” he chuckled. Now that she was out of combat-brain, she examined him a bit more closely. He was a tall humanoid man, with straight, black hair that went all the way down to the small of his back. He had it tied in an elegant tail—not a hair out of place.

  He must have been two stretches tall—a giant to give the black knight a challenge. His skin was a pale gray, and he had sharp fangs that, while not quite extending out of his mouth, were long enough to be intimidating. Otherwise, he was human-looking but for the two thin, black horns extending about a hand-length off the top of his head.

  He wore clothing of a type she’d never seen before, but the impression it gave her was “professional.” He had a black jacket over a white shirt with a black tie around his neck. The jacket was short, ending just below the waist, while the sleeves went down past the wrists and had shiny pieces of metal on the end. Black pants and shiny, polished black shoes completed the outfit.

  “‘We all’ know you? Who exactly is ‘we all?’” she asked. He just motioned again to the battlefield. “Okay…who are you, then?”

  “Rofocale, I’m called. Strategist, Steward of the Promontory, Limb—many names and titles. You, though, could just call me Uncle Rof,” he said with a smile.

  “...what exactly is going on here, Rofocale?” she asked pointedly.

  “A battle, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. This is business-as-usual in the Abyss,” he said lackadaisically. Julia frowned—not that she was surprised to learn this was the Abyss, but it didn’t exactly make her comfortable.

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  “So, this is real, then? I thought I was dreaming,” she said.

  Rofocale chuckled, glancing at her out of the corner of his gray eyes. “You say that as though those things are mutually exclusive.”

  “Take heed, Julia. Things you encounter here have a way of following you back, so tread carefully. It is much too early for you to be here at all, let alone on your own,” he cautioned, as though she had a choice in the matter.

  “You say that as though I’ll be coming here voluntarily in the future. Why would I ever want to do that?” she asked, a little annoyed. Why does everyone speak in riddles?

  “You’ll have to eventually. You’ve been touched by the Abyss. If you don’t confront it, it will confront you, and you do not want that. That said, you can put it off for quite a while yet,” he said, attempting to relieve her, probably.

  “How do I put it off? It’s not like I’m here because I want to be,” she explained in an exasperated tone.

  “Hmm…well, the Abyss is a place of thought, so you have to not think about it. There’s a reason you’ve arrived here at this specific moment. You probably already know, if you think about it. Remember what happened before you arrived here,” he said hintingly.

  Julia crossed her arms and tapped her foot, thinking. There was the black knight, she’d escaped him. She’d run through the swamp and encountered the felllord tormenting her friends. She lost it a little, at that point. Her memories grew faint and fuzzy, as though she was viewing them from behind a curtain.

  She’d created a gigantic tornado of water with lightning inside it, both suffused with her consumption spell, taking arrows to the body the entire time. Trixy had distracted the felllord enough that she could secure their escape uncontested, and she passed out immediately once they hit the ground and she let her water sphere go.

  “Well, mana exhaustion, no doubt. No way did I cast magic like that and not blow through my reserves,” she thought aloud.

  “That’s why you passed out, but it’s not why you’re here. You’re having trouble remembering past a certain point, yes? Do the memories feel far away or fuzzy? When else has that happened, for it’s happened to you at least one other time,” he said, not looking at her. He seemed fully focused on the far-off battle now.

  The pieces slid into place with the hint. When she’d thought about her confrontation with the Abyssal creature trying to infect her—that’s when the memories were hazy, and she’d ended up in that dream shortly after. Wait, no. That wasn’t right. She wasn’t in the dream until over a week later.

  Except she had been thinking about the Abyss then as well, hadn’t she? She was mourning the losses suffered that day. The Abyss was always present in those memories. Then, why hadn’t she ended up here immediately after the incident?

  Well, that was an easy one. The first few days in the swamp, she hardly slept at all, and when she did, it was restless and fitful. She probably didn’t enter a deep sleep even a single time her first few days in the swamp.

  “How exactly do you not think about something? It’s a paradox; the moment you think about not thinking about it, you’re thinking about it,” she said, becoming frustrated.

  “Distraction is a good method. You’re right, though. There’s no real way to ensure you don’t end up here again on your own. There’s also no guarantee myself or another of the Four will be present to watch over you.

  “So, take this,” he said as he held his hand out, palm-up in front of her. A colorful swirl of energy coalesced and formed a sapphire-colored ring, which he extended his hand and offered to her.

  “This is an anchoring ring. It does nothing except anchor your mind within your body. Sometimes, people inadvertently nudge against the Abyss while they sleep, but you…you have a connection to it—a direct channel between yourself and the Abyss that your mind can travel through. This will keep your mind from wandering if you wear it while you sleep,” he explained.

  Julia thought about taking the ring, and it disappeared from his hand. She didn’t have a body, so she wasn’t sure exactly how it had appeared in her possession. However, she immediately felt a tugging, as though there was a rope tied around her waist, and someone was pulling on it. The ring acted quickly, apparently.

  “Another caution, Julia. Do not call on the power of the Abyss if you can help it. You already have a strong connection to it that you’ll have to face eventually. No need to invite it into yourself further.

  “The Abyss is a place of thought. To take it into yourself unprepared is to invite thoughts not your own and integrate them into your very being. You risk becoming…different—not yourself,” he warned.

  “The Four will protect you out here as much as possible, but it simply isn’t feasible for us to assume we’ll always be able to find and protect you. You must do your part as well,” he declared.

  “Who are the Four? What are you talking about, why are you protecting me at all?” she asked in a flurry, as she could already feel her mind slipping away from this place.

  “We are the Four: The Strategist, The General, The Infiltrator, and The Executioner. We are the Limbs of the Watcher, and there’s no one we watch closer than you, Julia,” he said with a warm smile.

  “The Watcher, wait—” she shouted, but it was too late.

  Her mind retreated back to her body where she fell into a deep, mana-deprived sleep.