::10% Empowerment reached.::

  The world stood completely stock-still outside my apartment. The mother of all storms had been battering the apartment building until my new boss here froze time. I think it paused time, at least. Truth be told, my attention had fallen off from the wind, rain, and that dickhead Carlton Smith on Grace’s tv. The process started when Mr. Light extended his hand and touched my shoulder.

  Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong. Pain ain’t what I felt when it touched me. Sure, that white stuff that flowed from the boss-man into me looked an awful lot like light, but it also radiated heat like a big ol’ bed of coals waiting to embrace a whole hog—apple in its mouth and everything. Pain didn’t enter into the equation in a meaningful way. It hurt some. It also felt good, better than a hand job but worse than good sex. Only the release wasn’t from my dick, it was like Mr. Light stuck his hand into me as if I were a little doll, and somehow he reshaped what was inside of me.

  The pain in my chest went away. The aches in my hands and the scars from improvised explosive devices both vanished without a trace. It bubbled up into my mind that I’d be able to hold a steering wheel without my hands aching, and I wanted to cry. There was an alien space god or whatever the fuck it was healing me and giving me the power to hunt down assholes, and the idea of driving without pain was tickling my fancy. Ridiculous shit.

  ::Hormonal rebalancing will take place during the last ninety percent. Endure.:: The chorus of voices provided an answer to my unspoken thoughts.

  Light as thick as my forearm flowed down my throat and up my nasal passages. I didn’t know what it did to me then, but it felt revelatory—in a real come-to-church way. I got hard, who knows why. It was like being a teenager again—embarrassed about a bodily function you had no control over, especially not when your alien god monster had its forearm down your throat deep into your stomach while simultaneously up in your brain and sinuses.

  ::Harbinger Carrow, heed me. I have transferred you to a sealed location for the safety of your planet. You now become a Harbinger in truth with the essence of Lumen Arbitris. Expel excess energies if needed without concern for collateral damage.::

  Everything seemed to be white. I felt my eyes widen when Balance told me that we’d shifted location for the safety of my planet. How dangerous was this process, and were there chances of failure? I hadn’t asked. This was like MEPS, finding out the recruiter had sold me a pile of garbage and half-truths to get me on the bus to basic. My eyes wept tears of moisture into the air, and then my eyes evaporated. I repeat, my eyes evaporated. They turned to dust and blew away on the slightest gust of air. The overwhelming, retina-searing white of the room vanished in an instant—the sounds—my groaning and moaning—ended in the climactic explosion of my eardrums.

  Sightless and without hearing, the room pulsed in and out of existence around me. A sense I’d experienced before slipped into place like the beat of my heart. With each pulse of the chambers of my heart, information flowed into my brain. Details I’d missed about the room crawled into my mind. It was a large rectangular room, over a hundred feet long and forty wide. Large columns separated the center of the room from the periphery. At the front, a giant scale rested in the grip of an imposing statue of a winged woman that loomed malevolently over a chair—correction, a throne.

  The whiteness, with this new sense of mine, revealed the room to be a stark place. It appeared to be split in half, like a rectangular yin-yang, with the merging point of dark and light around the blocky throne. The room had a terrifying somberness that made going before a pissed-off Commanding Officer for Court-martial seem like a happy Sunday brunch. This wasn’t the sort of place where good things happened; even the torture chamber of your garden-variety dictator lacked the ominous, ultimate sense of judgment of this place.

  That’s how I realized it was a temple.

  ::This is the Room Without Mercy. It will serve as your office when we have finished.:: Mr. Light spoke to my thoughts but seemed to misunderstand my feelings about the room dramatically.

  ::75% Empowerment.::

  My gaze swept across the boss-man. He wasn’t a he. Man, woman, it shifted genders and shapes every few nanoseconds. Even with this elevated sense of perception, my mind couldn’t keep up with the rapid flickering of who and what it was. Like the room, it was much more than white energy and geometric symbols. The breadth of colors and sensations spawned by and in it made me irrationally angry because I couldn’t comprehend what I saw. It was like another language, and I only knew English, and English didn’t have words for any of this shit.

  The anger felt like a fire burning in my gut, festering for a moment before it exploded like wildfire through my whole body. Like my eyes, the last bits of my flesh burned away and scattered on a current of heated air. I stood exposed to the Room Without Mercy—only a Dustin-shaped pillar of fiery light and the convoluted, multi-dimensional being that was my boss.

  “What the fuck?” I screamed, or at least I tried to. I didn’t have a mouth, lungs, or any of the usual equipment I spent my life communicating with. The roar of flames exploded outward and left scorched marks on the nearest columns.

  :: Empowerment complete. Now, the hard work begins. Harbinger Kaela shall oversee your training.::

  If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  “Wait!” I shouted at the being of light and shapes, but it came out as more waves of scorching light. My attempt at communication either failed or was ignored because it vanished. There was no poof, no portal. It simply ceased to exist. This disappointed me for some reason, but my attention shifted when the wall where a section of dark stone spiraled open into a doorway, and a human-like figure entered.

  Human-like was the key part of that. The woman who entered wore what looked like a high-fashion gothic dress. Small slits in the strange black fabric revealed pale lavender skin that crimson flows of what might have been blood danced over, like liquid tattoos that flowed over her flesh. She wore a cloak that trailed dramatically behind her on nonexistent winds—no ordinary cloak but a tattered thing that looked like aged and torn parchment, covered in foreign, no, alien languages. She had long, straight black hair with bangs that framed her face. Large, red orbs of the red liquid that flowed over her flesh made up her eyes. A black feather quill with droplets of red perpetually waiting to fall rested lazily in her right hand. The red liquid, like my flaming pillar of a body, was Lumen Arbitris, I somehow knew.

  Voices accompanied her into the room, but no other people did. Laments of the damned swirled around the woman; their purpose was lost on me—maybe they didn’t even have a purpose beyond conveying the weight of tragedy this person carried upon her unbowed shoulders, but I doubted it.

  “Stop gawking and reform your physical existence,” the dark-clad woman commanded.

  “How?” I growled, simmering anger and resentment building inside my nonexistent belly.

  The woman rolled her eyes at me, then glared back at the door she had entered through. Whatever species she was, it was biologically close enough to humans that her face showed emotions like a human would.

  “The Arbiter did not even teach you the basics before dumping you on me?”

  “No.” I bellowed, and another wave of cascading power crashed around her. Interestingly, the wave of my expelled light-heat mixture parted around the woman without her even doing anything, as if my rage and confusion were unworthy of touching her. Still, a shower of blood-red sparks fanned off the tip of her quill when it happened.

  The woman pursed her lips and studied me.

  “I am known as Kaela of the Crimson Quill. I originally came from the Sanguine Web galaxy. You may properly introduce yourself to me once we have given you corporeal form again.” Kaela said flatly.

  “We start at the basics, then. Focus inwards. Close your eyes, if you had them. Feel the weight of your existence, the burden of your suffering, the tragedy of your world. Feel the core of your essence, the spark touched by the Arbiter to make you a Harbinger. You know, deep down, the truth and shape of your body. Let your soul guide your thoughts, as it guides the rhythm of your breath. Find it. Hold onto it. The you who is a pillar is a mere echo of the you who is a Harbinger. Feel the song from within.”

  Kaela spoke with a voice that enthralled a galaxy. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew this woman had caused an interstellar war that obliterated entire systems. Maybe it was in the whispers around her, the lament of doom, or perhaps it was communicated to me through the Lumen Arbitris. Sure, she looked like a gothic poet out of a wet dream from that Byron guy, and she talked a little like a vampire, but her confidence and charisma made me feel inadequate. I was just a grunt, and I’d never started any galactic wars.

  “Not yet, you haven’t,” Kaela laughed. “Yes, I can sense your thoughts. We will get to that after you can reclaim your identity.”

  “The Lumen obeys thought, not instinct. Imagine the shape you wish to take—not just limbs and sinew, but the idea of yourself. Who are you? What kind of man are you? Who is the Harbinger you will become? Let this image coalesce in your mind. Paint it with the broad strokes of a sketch. Let the light sculpt itself around this vision.”

  I wanted to flip Kaela the bird. I’d never been much of one for taking things like envisioning who you want to be seriously; it sounded like self-help bullshit. Who did I want to be? What kind of man was I? What kind of Harbinger would I be? I imagined myself with a black trench-coat like Neo from the Matrix. I let my memory fill in the rough details of how I looked, of my favorite pair of combat boots I’d never found after the commissary changed brands. A pair of billowy cargo pants and a black T-shirt. Simple. Comfortable. Dustin Carrow.

  I remained a pillar of fucking fire.

  “The fire burns because you will it to. To extinguish it, draw the flame inward. Imagine the heat folding into itself. Think of your center as a star, only instead of billowing light and heat, it sucks it in and retains it. It will take it all greedily. Let the radiance soften and condense until it no longer scorches and burns. Let it be a gentle hum beneath your skin, flowing through your veins, powering your muscles and tendons.” Kaela spoke with certainty, leaving me with no qualms about her knowledge. How she communicated broke barriers, defenses both rational and irrational, that I didn’t even know I’d raised.

  “Release yourself. The pillar is no longer a blaze—it is a frame. A vessel. Pour your determination into it, as water flows into a mold. Each finger, each heartbeat, each breath is yours to reclaim. Do not fear the emptiness as the fire fades; it makes room for your humanity.”

  I did what Kaela said. I poured myself into the mold of light. Did I fall through it? Or maybe the dark, cold sensation crept into my mind as I flowed into the waiting concentration of power. Cold like death, like a lonely room, darkness from which a thousand eyes stared at me. It made me feel like a little kid jumping at ghosts, but… if the Arbiter and Kaela were real, maybe ghosts were too?

  “Try again,” Kaela commanded. “From the start.”

  I tried, again and again, until eventually the mold of light looked like a shining Dustin Carrow, and I fell into it, the spark of my light dimming. I embraced the cold, trusting that Kaela and Lumen Arbitris would get me back to having a body.

  “When the final spark dims, you will feel the weight of your body again—skin cooling, your breath steadying. Open your eyes and see not the fire you were but the being you are. Lumen Arbitris is never lost; it waits, dormant, in the marrow of your soul, coursing through your blood, flesh, sinew, and bone. Call upon it, and it will blaze brighter than ever before.”

  I opened my eyes. My eyelids felt like a glove made specifically for my eyes, a sensation I had never noticed before. My body felt new, fresh, strong, and powerful, and within me, my heart felt full of scorching heat, and blinding light.

  Kaela clapped, twice, and laughed.

  “Third try. Maybe you have potential, but there is no excuse for the mundanity of your mind interpreting Lumen Arbitris as mere fire and light.” Kaela’s words held the sound of a whip cracking, and I wondered if her words had cut me. My stomach ached as if she’d punched me in the gut. Words… couldn’t do that, could they?

  Avatar-1 physicality has been set. Would you like to add another form to your favorites?

  “What the fuck was that voice?” I demanded.