Jordan's POV

I was walking through a wasteland. Surrounding me were the bodies of creatures that seemed to be filled with darkness, twisting and writhing in the throes of death as their pitch black blood oozed out and into the ground. All that filled my ears was the sound of screams, people shouting names with fear and pain filling their voices – people who I had never heard of up until now but yet they seemed so familiar to me. A demonic laugh echoed around the wasteland and the cries grew louder, drawing me to them subconsciously, my feet moving of their own accord. The stench of blood and death was so strong it brought bile to my throat as I passed each of the corpses. As I grew closer to the sounds the world seemed to focus, the rocks on the ground were becoming clearer and a small hill appearing just in front of me – not the eerie mist that was surrounding me before.

I climbed the hill and stood next to a huge boulder, seemingly invisible to the two figures that were battling just across from me. One of the fighters was a man, quite obviously deranged as if he had once been a good man but taken over but another. His robes were tattered, stained with the disgusting black blood and the pure crimson blood of a dying human. His eyes blazed vicious amber, a bit like a wolf going in for the kill on a sickly deer, arms waving in intricate patterns and causing shadows to leap from his fists towards his opponent – grinning maliciously with each drop of blood spilt. The opponent was worse for wear, a young girl whose eyes kept flickering between a beautiful shade of blue and a terrifying soulless black. The girl's clothes were also tattered but her own blood leaked out of them and the worrying paleness of her skin made me wonder whether she was going to win this fight.

They were fighting on top of a pile of bodies, faces that brought pain to me yet I couldn't name. Laying at the very top were three faces I did know, it was my friends. Tucker's body had been shredded by some unknown force, his face the only thing that allowed me to distinguish him from another pile of blood and limbs. His face was twisted in agony and his empty eyes stared at me as if accusing me of causing this. Sonja lay next to him; her neck sliced and dried blood clinging to her neck as if it could avert my eyes from the gaping wound that revealed the bones and muscles underneath. Her hand was reaching towards Tucker in death but she never reached him, dying alone and in pain. Tom was lying slightly further off, a shadow dagger in his chest and a look of fear that reminded me of something I couldn't remember, a memory that was on the edge of my mind and flitted away whenever I tried to grasp onto it.

Suddenly the fight ended, with a shadow blade being shoved through the girl's throat and I had to stand there and watch as she choked on her own blood, agony and regret in her eyes as she collapsed at my feet. The manic laugh of the survivor brought me out of my trance and I moved myself to be standing in front of him, wanting this all to end, for something to make sense and for my mind to stop acting against me. His voice was gravelly and cold, filled only with malice and cruelty.

"Nothing seems to make sense does it Jordan? You've been here for months, yet you are still an outcast. You don't belong with the others, but then again you never have. Before you jumped into that void you betrayed them over and over again yet none of you even remember it! You withheld knowledge and held their lives in your hands yet you chose wrong time and time again. People have died because of you, what you see here is what should have happened yet your ending just caused more suffering in the long run. They were all meant to die that day, you broke the prophecy, and you ruined everything! You lost your family, your friends, your love and now your sanity. Yet you remember none of this. You chose the cowards way out; maybe you should do it again? Seems all you are good at is being a coward, why not finish it off?"

With that, he disappeared into shadows and I fell through the world, the blocks around me collapsing into the void that sucked in everything around me – the blackness almost suffocating me as it curled around my falling form. The shadow creatures fell too, I could hear them flying next to me – constantly whispering dark thoughts and cruel ideas into my frail mind that just wouldn't silence as they bounced around my already empty void of a mind. The light underneath me grew closer and closer and I just prayed for this to end, that I would remember none of this when it was over, that the screams from a familiar woman and the bellows from my closest friends would never happen and that I would never have to face my own demons ever again.

------

I woke up in my fortress, my heart beating at a thousand miles per hour and beads of sweat pouring down my neck. My hands were shaking violently and they were cold and clammy, I knew the rest of my skin would be pale and the huge purple bags under my eyes would be looking like giant bruises as if someone had punched me straight in the eye over and over again. I shoved off the covers and stood up, ignoring the slight wave of vertigo that hit me for sitting up too fast. Dragging my heavy feet to the elevator, I jumped upwards and felt the rush of air carrying me up to the roof, where the stars were shimmering and the realm was quiet. I could think properly out here, not suffocated by social convention or having to rely on someone else's opinions to back up my own thoughts.

It had been several months since we had arrived in this realm and everyone had settled into doing their own thing. James naturally had become our resident wizard - always testing various spells on me when he would let me, the first time I had been a test subject I had all my great armour on and it was almost broken by the impact. I spent a lot more time around James than the others but that was because he was a generally easy going guy who didn't pry into your personal business if you didn't want him to, plus I was interested in the capabilities of magic so it was always nice to chat with him. Tucker had moved onto blood magic and took great pride in flaunting his anti-projectile armour and success in the purges, to the great annoyance of myself and the others. Sonja had opened up a miniature restaurant and spent a lot of her time either cooking or dabbling into thaumcraft, always appearing with fancy foods or forgetting to stop making us all sick with flux flu. Tom was just being Tom, messing around with various different areas of expertise whilst wandering around and whining for someone to entertain him.

I had thrown myself into Applied Energistics, the complex creations and machinery that needed maintaining constantly giving me excuses not to attend social events and allowing my mind to focus on something else apart from its contents. Meeting the new people in the realm had been interesting yes, there were some real characters here but none of them could understand or explain why we were here and why we all seemed to look like the four people who disappeared all those years ago. It confused me, why did it matter that I looked like this Spark? I caught Martha on more than one occasion staring at me with a wistful glance in her eye as if I would disappear and her father would suddenly appear to take my place. Everywhere I looked there seemed to be love – Martha, Steve and James all getting very cosy with one another as well as Sonja and Tucker flaunting their relationship in front of me. Tom ignored it, he didn't seem to care but I couldn't help but take it all personally as if it was hurting me to see something I didn't have.

Tom's ramblings about Dianite had actually come true, turns out Dianite was floating around as a spirit, watching everyone and commenting on it to make sure he could spook as many people as possible. It was quite sweet to watch him interacting with Martha; he was a nice uncle to her, however, it was hard to have a conversation with him especially since I didn't follow him. I still remembered from the last realm where Dianite had proclaimed to get me on his team before we all jumped into the void, I understood that the gods had completely different personalities in this realm but I just struggled to trust him. Then again, after what I'd heard about Mianite from Martha I didn't particularly want to be friends with him either.

I'd met Ianite in the End, her initial reaction talking about Spark and how I wasn't him, I could feel the walls building up between us – my only source of hope and comfort against these weird nightmares being sealed off from me. I couldn't help that I looked like Spark, or that I was his 'alternate' as everyone kept going on about, I needed help from my goddess – the one I had become an outcast for, the one I owed everything to and the one who could explain why this all was happening and why it was happening to me. She promised to look out for me and to keep in contact but I rarely saw her despite all the pies and gifts I brought her to try and make up for the fact I wasn't Spark. She tired easily and spent a lot of time resting or talking to Martha, leaving me standing awkwardly at the side as if I didn't exist in their eyes.

I stood up and brushed myself down, seeing the sun rising on the edges of the land – banishing the shadows back to the darkness for another day. I leant forward and allowed my wings to spread out, a beautiful set of dragon wings that shimmered and danced in the dawn light, carrying me effortlessly over to the meeting place I had agreed to see Andor at as soon as possible. I landed carefully, sighing as my wings retracted again before turning to face Andor who was staring at the shimmering water of the moat that surrounded the town, right at the edge of the threshold that I could not cross. I stuck my hands in my pockets and leant back slightly, waiting for him to speak his mind – a routine I had grown used to. Andor did support Ianite as I had suspected and his father was extremely against it, going as far as to ban her name from being spoken in the town at all. Whenever he wanted stories of how my Ianite used to be or what her values were on a certain topic, he'd come to me and we'd talk about our goddess until the sun sank in the sky or until the King bellowed for Andor to make himself useful. Recently Andor had been more distant, lost in thought and refusing to explain what was running through his head, until now apparently.

"Jordan... I'm going to make a speech tomorrow. I'm tired of having to suppress my beliefs, tired of never being able to see my grandmother, never being able to even speak about her. My father is lost in the madness of grief and hatred, drawn to Mianite in order to find some sanity and grasp on reality. He is using his power as a weapon now, demoralising citizens and forcing them to accept his beliefs. This is a dictatorship, there is no input from me or from his advisors anymore – we are merely white noise. I've believed in Ianite since I was young and I'm not going to turn my back on her now, no matter how different she may be the one you speak of so fondly. I need to do this and I hope you can be there to support me, just to listen and if it comes to it, to protect me so I can finish my speech without my father's intervention. May Ianite protect us both."