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All Characters in the story are 18 years of age and above...
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Chapter Eighty-Two: Elder...
"Got you!"
Judging by the way her eyes went wide with both shock and panic, Olivia's true self felt the connection form at the same time that Greg did. He didn't know how, but it would seem that all this time, Morpheus hadn't just been talking. Using the connection between Olivia's true self and her clone, he somehow followed it back to the true Olivia, creating a connection of his own that Olivia's true self couldn't as easily cut. All this time that he'd been exchanging threats with her, had been a ruse. A magician's misdirection. While one hand dazzled his audience, the other was busy with the actual trick. This left Greg questioning, had Morpheus been smiling because the observation that he didn't care about Greg was true? Or was it because he had succeeded in his underhanded play?
Greg immediately felt the tug on the new connection that had formed between Olivia's true self and them as the Primordial tried to break it. To her credit, the connection did start to break. The speed at which it was doing so, however, was slow enough that she'd need a few minutes to fully break it. It wasn't a ridiculous amount but in a fight at their level, it might as well have been forever. Morpheus had outmaneuvered her and they both knew it. Ignoring the thrashing of his prey, Morpheus raised Greg's right hand and began to carve into the air.
This wasn't a figure of speech, Greg could quite literally feel the fabric of reality acquiesce as Morpheus carved intricate words of power into it. Greg wasn't sure what it was he was writing. Olivia's true self, however, seemed to recognize what it was as her efforts to free herself of the bond became even more frantic the longer that Morpheus wrote. Detached as he was from his body, Greg didn't feel it directly. There was, however, an excruciating pain spreading out from the tip of his finger to the rest of his body. Whatever it was that Morpheus was putting together, was at such a level that Greg felt like his body was about to fall apart just from writing it out. His index finger started bleeding just a quarter of the way through. By the time he got to the halfway mark, The tip of his finger had been ground down to the bone. Three-quarters of the way there and his finger had been ground down to the first knuckle. All this while, Morpheus maintained a coldly indifferent demeanor as if the suffering of this body meant nothing to him.
"There is no irreconcilable enmity between us!" Olivia's true self finally spoke through her avatar. Morpheus had come to the end of whatever it was he'd been writing and only a small nub had been left of Greg's right index finger. Olivia's true self, on the other hand, had only managed to get halfway in her attempt to break the connection between them. While her tone was of one trying to be reasonable, no one present missed the dangerous edge in her voice. She had the crazed look of a wolf trying to decide whether or not to chew off its own leg to free itself from a trap. "We can stop here and I'll compensate you for the offense caused," She offered, trying to be diplomatic.
"Of course, you were just planning to get my eyes as a keepsake, weren't you?" Morpheus questioned, sarcasm dripping off every word. Everyone present knew that had Olivia's true self gotten hold of Morpheus's eyes she would have killed him with zero hesitation. "You were just joking when you threatened to destroy the boy's soul, weren't you?" He continued in the same tone, no longer looking at the familiar but down at the nub that used to be Greg's index finger. Greg, who had been fearing that Morpheus would leave his finger damaged, let out a figurative sigh of relief when he noticed it start to grow back.
The process was slow and somehow even more painful than writing out the strange words of power had been. In a manner that he couldn't quite understand, Greg got the feeling that the very world around him was objecting to the restoration of this digit. It was as if, the very laws of the world dictated that this digit had been destroyed and Morpheus's efforts to heal it were in defiance of those laws. This, however, didn't seem to bother Morpheus in the least as he continued his work. Greg suspected that there was an overlap between the way he and the way Morpheus saw the world. Otherwise, he had no way of explaining what he was seeing. It was a lot like looking at an object and seeing a chair and a tree at the same time. On the one hand, Greg watched as first, bone broke through the nub, sprouting like a young plant. Once it had reached the right length, the flesh around the nub slowly started crawling forward to cover it.
But while this is what it looked like on one level, on another, Greg was looking at a strange string of characters occupying the same space that his finger once did. It was as if rather than a finger, someone had used this strange language to define what a finger is and what it should do. Whatever this language was, however, it seemed capable of defining reality as was evidenced by the fact that, as soon as the string of characters was complete, his finger was once again in its place as if nothing had ever happened to it. Greg remained tense throughout the process, fearing that something would go wrong. Luckily nothing did. His index finger had been destroyed at the level of law and Morpheus had restored it at the same level.
When Morpheus turned to once again look in Olivia's direction, a smile crossed Greg's features. Greg doubted that Olivia's true self was aware that she was projecting her emotions through her clone. This was the only explanation Greg could come up with as he saw no benefit for the Primordial in making her avatar appear white as a sheet of paper. "Y... you know the language of creation?" The words left Olivia's lips in a stammer. Greg doubted that the Primordial had ever been forced to stammer in all her life. There was, however, no faking the bone-deep fear that seemed to have taken hold of her.
"Interesting, I wouldn't expect a child like you to recognize it," Morpheus answered. Greg knew that Olivia's true self was probably tens of thousands of years old, as such, it felt odd to have her called a child. If he was to be believed, however, Morpheus's jail sentence alone had been more than seven hundred thousand years. And so, in a way, it did make sense that he'd think of the Primordial as a child. "Tell me, have you ever experienced a curse fashioned from the language of creation?" he questioned. The words were spoken in such a cordial tone that it would have been all too easy to miss the fact that it was a threat.
