Crouching over a bucket, Tori sliced open the wrist on her left hand.

Biting her lip, she wiped the cold sweat from her forehead, watching as the fresh wound ceased bleeding and her skin stitched itself back together.

Her gaze fixed on the bucket, Tori's eyes lost focus. Finally, she could free herself from the torment her current life had imposed on her.

Her body had become foreign to her—a vessel for the remnants of creatures whose abilities had been stripped and grafted onto her, constantly encroaching on her sense of self.

Tori could no longer guarantee control over her body.

A translucent figure drifted over Tori’s ritual materials.

"Are you sure you want to go through with this? Shouldn't you, of all people, understand the consequences of getting involved with such dark arts?"

“…you're acting as if I have any other choice.”

Tori muttered, the break in concentration allowing her right arm to jerk out of her control, smudging the freshly painted lines.

Feeling her grasp over her limbs slipping, Tori creased her brows and popped a pill from her utility belt.

“Look, Ashe, I don’t have much time left, and there are only so many stabilizers left to abuse.”

Trudging straight through Ashe’s ghostly visage, Tori snatched a rag and wiped the red streaks. By now, the pungent smell of blood had become as familiar to her as her own scent.

“I doubt this shit can get any worse. Who knows, maybe it’ll even put me out of my misery.”

Tori lightly smirked to herself, her light demeanour eliciting a soft sigh from Ashe, who sunk back into the room's shadows.

The only sound left in the room was the strokes from Tori retracing each line in her own blood.

. . .

With the last line etched into the wooden floorboards, Tori knelt in front of the central statue, ignoring the irritation of the scarred tissue down her thighs.

“Thank Kataar, I’m finally done.”

A crimson glow spread through the stained blood, illuminating the enclosed space.

The walls appeared to collapse as the space overlapped with a realm beyond the material plane.

Intricate patterns, mirroring those carved into the floor, branded themself into Tori’s flesh.

The pain overloaded her senses while patterns peeled themselves from the floor and suspended Tori in the air.

Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the space collapsed.

With a final, agonizing gasp, Tori collapsed to the ground, her consciousness slipping away into darkness.

As her body lay still, Tori's skull pounded with the whispers of the remnant soul. Immobilized, a witness to her transformation, Tori lay in abject horror as the vessel of The Deep returned.

. . .

“Those poor unfortunate souls, stained by the breath of creatures from The Deep. Forever strangers to their own body, evicted from their flesh and blood. Doomed to become sober observers to the takeover of their body.” - Aloh Zareth, “Reflections on Sacrificial Dark Arts”