The cavern was a theatre of despair, and they were the unwilling audience. The misty, parasitic creature pulsed with a sickening rhythm, its form shifting with the victim's wracking sobs. As it sensed their presence at the tunnel mouth, the shapeless mass that served as its head turned towards them.
The mimicked voice changed, becoming higher, younger. A child's voice now, filled with terror. "It's so dark… please, don't leave me…"
Anya flinched as if struck. The sound was a scalpel, expertly probing for a weakness, an old wound. "It's tasting us," she breathed, her face pale. "Looking for a memory it can use." She tugged hard on Elias's sleeve. "There's no body to hit, Elias. My bolts will pass right through it. There's nothing to fight here. We leave. Now."
Her logic was flawless. Her survival instinct was screaming. But Elias couldn't tear his gaze away from the kneeling man, who was visibly fading, becoming more translucent with every pulse of the creature. He wasn't just being fed upon; he was being unwritten.
"You're right," Elias said, his mind racing, observing every detail of the horrific symbiosis. "We can't fight the shadow." He watched the flow of energy, the way the man's despair gave the creature substance. The mist wasn't just clinging to him; it was an extension of him. "Its strength is his sorrow. We don't have to kill it."
Anya stared at him as if he'd gone mad. "What are you talking about?"
"We have to starve it," Elias explained, his gaze intense. He looked at Anya, his plan forming, as audacious as it was desperate. "I can't fight the creature, but I might be able to heal the man. If I can break his despair, I can cut off its food supply."
Anya's mouth opened, then closed. The idea was insane. Healing a mind was a fantasy. Healing a mind in the middle of being devoured by a psychic parasite was the babbling of a lunatic. Yet, she remembered the feeling of his Resonance, the impossible warmth that had knit her flesh back together. What were its limits?
"And what's it going to be doing while you're holding this man's hand and whispering sweet nothings?" she shot back, her pragmatism warring with a flicker of insane curiosity.
"That's where you come in," Elias said, never taking his eyes off the creature. "It won't let me get close. It will defend its meal. I need you to keep it off me."
"Keep a shadow off you? How?"
"It has no body, but its influence does," Elias reasoned. "It's a creature of Resonance. It will use the cavern itself, the psychic residue. Be ready for anything."
Before Anya could protest further, Elias began to move. He walked calmly into the cavern, his steps measured, his focus absolute.
The Sorrow-Eater reacted instantly. The child's voice turned into a multisided shriek of rage. The grey mist billowed, and the very rock of the cavern floor seemed to groan. A sliver of black, crystalline rock—solidified despair—shot from the wall, aimed directly at Elias's head.
THWACK!
A crossbow bolt slammed into the crystal shard mid-air, shattering it into harmless dust. Anya was already moving, her crossbow a blur as she reloaded. "I hate you, Healer!" she yelled, but her stance was firm, her aim true. She had made her choice.
Elias didn't flinch. He kept walking. Phantoms began to bleed from the walls—shadowy figures of past victims, their faces locked in silent screams. They swiped at him with immaterial claws. Anya couldn't shoot them, but as one lunged, she stomped her foot, and a wave of kinetic force—a silent, invisible shove—erupted from her, blasting the phantom apart like smoke in the wind. She was fighting the symptoms, just as he'd predicted.
He was halfway to the victim. The Sorrow-Eater redoubled its efforts. The psychic pressure in the cavern became immense, a crushing weight of grief that threatened to bring him to his knees. He felt his own ghosts stirring—the faces of soldiers he couldn't save, the smell of the plague tents. He pushed them down, holding onto his core principle like a shield. His cruelty doesn't have to become mine.
Finally, he reached the kneeling man. He placed a hand on his shoulder. The man didn't react, lost in his prison of sorrow. Elias knew a simple touch wouldn't be enough. He couldn't just mend a broken mind like a broken bone. He had to give it a reason to be whole.
He knelt, bringing his face close to the man's ear, ignoring the shrieking static of the parasite behind him. He didn't offer empty platitudes. He spoke with the quiet authority of a man who had stared into the abyss himself.
"I hear you," Elias said, his voice a low, resonant hum. "I have been where you are. I have felt the weight that crushes the soul. But that despair is not you. It is a shadow that lies. It is a thief that has stolen your story."
He closed his eyes and unleashed his Resonance. But he didn't focus on mending. He focused on the concept of Integrity. He projected the feeling of a backbone straightening, of a fire being rekindled, of a clear, bright morning after a long, dark night. It wasn't a memory, but the promise of one. A wave of pure, undiluted Hope, a counter-frequency to the all-consuming sorrow.
A brilliant, golden light flared from Elias, a miniature sunrise in the dark cavern. It wasn't hot, but it was intensely pure.
The man's sobs stuttered and stopped. He took a single, shuddering breath. The Sorrow-Eater shrieked, a sound of agony and fury as its food source was poisoned at the root. The grey mist recoiled from the golden light as if from a fire, its form destabilizing, unable to maintain its cohesion.
With a final, desperate wail that echoed through the stone, the creature detached from the man's back, its misty form imploding into a single, dark wisp before vanishing into a crack in the far wall.
Silence.
The psychic pressure vanished. The phantoms dissolved. The man collapsed, unconscious, onto the cavern floor. He was alive. Scarred in spirit, perhaps, but whole.
Elias knelt beside him, breathing heavily, the effort costing him more than any physical exertion.
Anya slowly lowered her crossbow, her knuckles white, her breath misting in the sudden cold. She stared from the empty space where the monster had been, to the unconscious man, and finally to Elias. She had just witnessed a battle that defied every rule of the Verse she had ever learned. A fight that was won not with a sharper blade or a stronger poison, but with a philosophy.
The quiet healer hadn't just saved a man. He had weaponized hope.