When I woke up I felt something squirming under me.

  "Get off me," Harper groaned from beneath me. I rolled off her and tried not to barf as intense pain hit my stomach. I gave in and puked everywhere.

  Harper and I lay there for a second or two and then got up.

  "What even happened?" Harper said. I looked around and my eyes went wide at the state of our surroundings.

  "Whoa," I said. The place looked like a bomb had been dropped. Harper and I were mere inches away from a large crater in the ground. It was massive, and in the middle of it all was my sword, sticking straight up in the ash. My sword was right in the middle of the perfect circle that was the crater.

  As my eyes continued to rove the scene, I saw how everything around the crater was knocked down as far as I could see. I had made quite the explosion.

  "That's insane," Harper said. "How did we even survive that?"

  "It must have been my suit of armor," I said, looking down at my gold armor that was still pristine, the gold shining in what faint light there was. Harper was giving the suit a look of respect.

  "I wonder if my dress holds that much power," Harper joked, looking down at her dress that was in tatters from the explosion. I shook my head at her jokingly.

  "Do you hear that?" Harper said with a ghastly look on her face. "It's some type of snuffling."

  "Snuffling?" I asked. "What kind of snuffling?"

  "Like a dog when it's looking for something in the grass," Harper said, concentrating. "It's coming from over there."

  Harper pointed to a random spot several hundred yards away that was completely decimated by the blast. There was nothing there.

  "Are you sure about that?" I asked Harper, and she nodded her head.

  "There's definitely something there," she said. "I can hear it clear as day."

  Then I remembered something that Michael had mentioned to me before the wislis had struck. He had mentioned something about an invisible creature that would eat everything that crossed its path.

  "I think we're being hunted," I whispered to Harper. "Let's keep moving, and if you hear it get any closer, tell me."

  We started to walk toward the abandoned mine that I could now see clearly since I had accidentally destroyed all the trees. We walked slowly and carefully, but Harper kept telling me that the creature was getting closer.

  "Michael called it a wreech, right?" Harper said under her breath. I nodded my head as I carefully dodged a stray twig.

  "Well, that wreech is only a hundred yards away from us, and it's picking up the pace." I gulped and started to walk faster. Harper looked behind us and gasped.

  "It's gruesome," she said, shuddering. I looked where she was looking but couldn't see a thing. "It looks like a cross between a lizard and a human, and it's like ten feet tall."

  I grimaced at the description and asked Harper how she was even seeing any of this. She looked behind her again and looked like she was going to faint.

  "It's that fear again," she said, shuddering. "It's... Dark... Matter."

  She collapsed onto the ground and I too started to feel the fear, the hopelessness, the despair. I pulled out my sword and put a little bit of matter on the end. Harper started to stir again, and the horrible feeling started to go away.

  It was then that I started to see the beast. It shimmered ever so slightly, but I could make out the faint outline of an old hag who looked barely human and mostly beast. I would have felt like I could take her on, besides the fact that she was literally twice as tall as me and twice as strong.

  Harper started to rise to her feet and then collapsed again as a new wave of evil washed over us, and I was finding it difficult to stay conscious myself. The light on the tip of my sword flickered out.

  YOU WILL DIE, I heard a voice whisper into my soul. YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO SURVIVE IN THE FIRST PLACE. YOU WERE A MISTAKE.

  I cowered in my new gold boots. Maybe I was a mistake? Maybe I should just curl up and die?

  DON'T LISTEN TO— I felt a wave of hope wash over me and I felt like I could conquer the world, but right as it came, it went and I was on my own again.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Darkness started to flood out of the creature and creep toward us. I was frozen, trying to stay conscious as best I could.

  Boom! The dirt by the creature's feet exploded, knocking me and Harper aside. The creature recoiled for a second as some type of spaceship landed next to us.

  It was a strange-looking thing, shaped like a bowl, but it was the size of a house and had a large gun on top of it. A hatch opened from it and Michael was standing there.

  "Get in!" he yelled. "I won't be able to hold the wreech for long!"

  I got the last of the matter from my soul and put equal amounts into me and Harper. With our spirits bolstered, we got up and sprinted to the strange aircraft. Once we were inside, the door shut and we collapsed onto the floor. All my matter was gone.

  Thud. Something big was slamming into the side of our craft and Michael went pale. I saw him looking at a video monitor, desperately pressing knobs and switches.

  I felt us lift into the air, but what I saw on the screen did not look good. The wreech was now fully visible, and it was dissolving into darkness, the creature only barely alive. The Dark Matter was slamming into some type of shield relentlessly, and it was making the whole craft shudder.

  "Get ready!" Michael yelled. "This is about to get messy!"

  Michael pressed a button. I saw the barrier go down, but our guns fired at the same time, blowing the wreech to shreds.

  The Dark Matter exploded instantly, and our ship was thrown into the sky like a Frisbee. I held onto a chair as Michael frantically pressed buttons, and after ten minutes we were stable and just hovering.

  Michael wiped the sweat that had been forming on his brow and looked at us, raising an eyebrow at our outfits. It looked like we were safe. For now.

  Michael was absolutely ecstatic about our little encounter with the Gimlongs. Apparently, he had done quite a bit of research about them, and he told me that many, many men had gone into the Gimlongs' lair hoping to get the suit of armor, but all of them got kicked back out naked. (I joked with Michael and told him about the golden undies, asking him what was so special about underwear.)

  So, as I learned, my suit of armor held immense power, and whoever had it had the chance to become so powerful that they would be considered a god. The only catch was that the Gimlongs would only give the armor to someone who was pure and had ancient ancestry.

  "What do you mean by ancient ancestry?" I asked Michael, thinking back to my encounter with Austin and how, when I mentioned my ancestry, he refrained from killing Harper.

  "I don't know. Nothing about the legend really tells us anything," Michael said. "All I really know is that, based on what I researched, the person who gets the suit will already have immense power at their fingertips, but the armor and sword are sort of like a way to channel it, if that makes sense."

  I nodded my head. It definitely fit the description of what I was experiencing. It made me wonder how the Gimlongs had had these types of prophecies in the first place.

  "There is one more thing," Michael said. "In the legends a lot of these things are vague, but one thing is clear: the power that this person will have will not be Dark Matter. This is where experts turn their heads and say that the whole thing is made up."

  "Hmmm," I said. "What I'm manipulating is nothing like Dark Matter, that is for sure."

  "The experts do agree on one thing though," Michael said quietly. "If that power does exist, the person with that power would have to be killed."

  "Killed!" Harper said, startled.

  "Yeah," I said. "That doesn't sound all too good for me."

  "Killed," Michael said. "Many of the texts say that this foreign matter that this person will be able to manipulate will sort of be like water and fire. If this person were to attack society, no one would stand a chance. Everything that holds our spaceships together, that keeps humanity thriving underground on Earth—everything—would be easy to attack, and humanity as we know it would unravel. The only pro might be that this person could have a chance at defeating the Dark Lord."

  I stayed quiet for a couple of minutes, digesting what this all meant. If I could be the only one who could defeat the Dark Lord, then it made total sense that he would be trying to hunt me down and kill me before I became too powerful. It also made sense that even people like Claire and Bajer would want to be rid of me. My existing could mean the end of their power, and I knew from experience that people did not give up their power lightly.

  "I can't let anybody figure out who I really am," I said grimly.

  "You can't," Michael agreed. "Though, the good thing is that not many people know this legend, so you should be fine."

  Harper patted me on the back and then abruptly switched the topic to something else just as horrifying.

  "What about that wreech?"

  I nodded my head. I didn't know very much about wreeches, but I figured that it wasn't very common for a creature to be able to manipulate Dark Matter like that.

  "Wreeches," Michael mumbled. "Well, I couldn't actually find much about them, because they are very rare to find and when there is an encounter it isn't very common that there are any survivors. The wreech comes in the wind and eats everyone before they know what hit them."

  I shuddered to myself and looked at Harper, wondering how in the world she had heard that thing coming. Her hearing had to be impeccable! I asked her about it.

  "I don't know," Harper said. "I guess it probably isn't very common to be able to hear something so quiet from so far away, is it?"

  Michael blushed for some reason and I could tell he knew what was going on with her but didn't want to bring it up. I let it go.

  "Anyway," I said, breaking the silence with a yawn. "I assume we are on course for the academy?"

  "Yeah," Michael said. "If we maintain this pace and don't run into any trouble, then we should arrive in about two hours. It sucks, though, because we had to change our route a little bit. Herds of floadons were blocking the direct route."

  We sat in silence for a little bit and then Michael started to talk about the ecosystem on Titan and how life thrived without any plants and blah, blah, blah. I let the words wash over me and found myself getting sleepy.

  Michael started to talk about something more interesting when I felt Harper put her head on my shoulder. I put my head on hers and we were asleep in minutes. Michael only seemed moderately offended when we woke up.

  "We got a problem," I heard Michael say. I lifted my head off Harper and looked to see what he was talking about. He gestured at a screen and I gasped at what I saw. There was a bird the size of a mansion flying right at us. Its eyes were pitch black.