Chapter 7: The Astral Plane

Chapter 7: The Astral Plane

There was no time for recovery. Liora watched him spit blood onto the rug with the disinterest of someone watching a leaky faucet. “The psychic trauma of a direct confrontation can cause minor physical hemorrhaging,” she commented, as if reading from a textbook. “It will pass. Get up.”

Elio pushed himself to his feet, his entire body feeling like a live wire. The exhaustion was profound, but underneath it, a new and dangerous current hummed. He had pushed back. He had made one of them recoil. It was a single drop of water against a raging fire, but it was not nothing.

“Your rage is a blunt instrument,” Liora continued, beginning to pace the room. “Effective for a single, desperate blow, but it will burn you out. Now, you will learn to modulate it. To use it not as a cudgel, but as a key. You saw your sister’s light once through a haze of whiskey and blind fury. You will find it again. Sober. And with intent.”

She gestured toward a high-backed, velvet armchair that faced a cold, dark window. It looked ancient and sinister, a throne for a decaying monarch. “Sit.”

He obeyed, sinking into the chair. The velvet felt cold, almost damp, and seemed to cling to him. The psychic residue here was thick, cloying. He could feel the faint imprints of others who had sat here before him—their anxieties, their desperate hopes.

“Close your eyes,” Liora commanded. “Find that fire you just used. The anger. The protective instinct. But do not unleash it. Hold it. Shape it into a single, sharp point. Let it be your focus. It is the engine. Your love for her… that is the compass. Now, use that engine to push yourself out. Past the flesh. Past the walls of this house. Go.”

Elio closed his eyes, shutting out the decaying opulence of the room. He breathed in, then out, trying to ignore the chorus of faint whispers that immediately began to pluck at the edges of his consciousness. He summoned the image from his vision: Sarah’s light, pure and small, with the monstrous shadows of The Echoes looming over her, their tendrils draining her away.

The rage returned instantly, hot and clean. But this time, following Liora’s instruction, he didn’t let it explode. He contained it, compressed it, molding it into a needle of white-hot energy inside his chest. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. The power wanted to be released, to lash out, but he held it, his entire being trembling with the strain.

Then, he pushed.

There was a sickening lurch, like the moment a falling elevator begins to drop. A sensation of peeling away from himself, layer by layer. He felt his connection to the velvet chair, to the floor beneath his feet, to the very weight of his own body, dissolve. The cacophony of the house faded, replaced by a low, internal hum. With a final, silent snap, he was free.

He opened his astral eyes.

He was floating in the drawing room, looking down at his own empty body slumped in the chair, a thin trickle of blood still drying on his upper lip. Liora stood beside him, her arms crossed, watching his physical form with an unreadable expression.

But the room itself was wrong. The walls were translucent, shifting like smoke, and beyond them was not the rest of the mansion, but a grey, formless mist. The priceless furniture was distorted, stretched and twisted into nightmarish shapes by the emotional weight they carried. A vase of dead flowers wept tears of inky despair that pooled on the floor. This wasn’t the physical world; it was its emotional blueprint, a landscape built from memory and feeling. The Astral Plane.

Far in the distance, through the swirling grey fog, he saw it. A tiny, flickering pinprick of pure white light. Sarah.

He focused on it, his love for her acting as a tether, and willed himself forward. He moved through the wall of the drawing room, the substance of it passing through him like cold smoke, and emerged into the wider astral geography of the estate.

It was a nightmare sculpted by Dali. Sections of the mansion floated unmoored in the grey void—a grand staircase that led to nowhere, a ballroom where silent, ghostly couples waltzed in an endless loop of celebration turned to terror. The air itself was thick with psychic debris. Small, formless entities, like shadowy amoebas, drifted through the mist, feeding on stray wisps of fear and sorrow. They sensed his potent, directed energy and shied away, instinctively avoiding a predator higher on the food chain. This plane was treacherous, and Liora's influence was a palpable pressure, a subtle gravity that tried to pull him off course, toward memories of his own failures. The image of Chloe’s tear-streaked face materialized in the mist before him, a psychic tripwire meant to mire him in his own guilt.

He blasted it away with a pulse of his focused rage and pushed on, his eyes fixed on Sarah’s light.

He was getting closer, but something lay in his path. It was a sphere of pulsing, crystalline light, about the size of his fist, hovering in the void. Unlike the rest of the chaotic landscape, it was strangely stable, radiating a powerful, singular emotion: hope. A desperate, brilliant hope that was so beautiful it was painful to behold. It was a memory, left here like a scar, too intense to dissipate.

Drawn by its intensity, he reached out. His astral fingers brushed against its surface.

The world dissolved. He was no longer Elio.

He was a young man named Leo, with a guitar case in his hand and a heart full of dreams. He felt the cheap fabric of his jacket, the nervous energy thrumming through his veins. He was standing in Liora’s drawing room, the real one, the one of wood and velvet. Liora was smiling at him, a warm, maternal smile that melted his apprehension.

“You have a gift, Leo,” she was saying, her voice a balm on his soul. “A fire. The world will hear your songs. I will make sure of it.”

He felt a surge of overwhelming gratitude. This woman, this powerful, elegant woman, saw him. She believed in him. This was it. The break he had been waiting for his entire life.

The memory fast-forwarded. He was in a different room now, a sound-proofed studio deep in the mansion's bowels. He was playing his guitar, pouring his soul into a song about hope and tomorrow. Liora watched, her smile never wavering. But something was wrong. The air was growing cold. The notes from his guitar began to sound thin, dissonant. His hope, the fuel for his music, was draining away, being pulled from him by an unseen force.

Fear began to curdle his hope. He stopped playing. “What’s happening?” he asked, his voice trembling.

“The final stage of the audition,” Liora said, her smile finally vanishing, replaced by that cold, appraising look he knew so well. “They need to hear you.”

She stepped back, moving into the shadows. And from the deepest part of the darkness, they emerged. The Echoes.

Through Leo’s eyes, Elio witnessed their arrival. The sheer, alien wrongness of them was a physical blow. The way they didn’t walk, but simply were. The way the air curdled around their shifting, shadowy forms. The terrible, silent hunger emanating from their milky-white eyes.

Leo tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed by the psychic pressure. One of the beings reached out, its long, smoky fingers phasing through his chest. He didn't feel pain. He felt… an unraveling. He felt his song being pulled from his memory. He felt the face of his mother dissolving in his mind. He felt his name, Leo, being siphoned away, consumed and digested by the silent, starving shadow. He was being unmade, erased from existence, his entire being reduced to a final, exquisite note of terror-laced hope.

With a wrenching tear, Elio was thrown out of the memory, back into the grey chaos of the astral plane. He was himself again, trembling violently, the ghost of Leo’s final scream echoing in his own soul.

The crystalline sphere of hope was gone, its last energy expended in the replaying of the memory. He now understood. This was the process. Liora didn't drag her victims kicking and screaming. She nurtured their brightest flame—their hope, their ambition, their love—only to serve it up as a gourmet meal.

He looked toward the pinprick of light in the distance. Sarah’s light. It wasn’t just a beacon. It was a ticking clock. And he now knew, with chilling certainty, exactly what was happening on the other side.