Dimensional Descent

"Oh? You recognize these?" Aina asked softly. "I guess you would, right?"

She took her time to stake the wooden pillars into the ground. Every time she touched it and another layer of her skin fell to the ground, rotten and sizzling, the Brazingers would flinch again. They couldn't even feel Aina's earlier rage, and yet this silence felt so much more oppressive, the heaviness of it all gripping at their throats and pressing down.

"They call this Black Wood, a simple name, quite short, succinct... I guess its history speaks for itself."

The calmness in Aina's voice was eerie. They had heard too much about this supposed Black Wood, enough to know that most wouldn't dare to even try to handle it without specialized equipment, and that went for experts that surpassed even the Seventh Dimension.

Just looking at the ground they were pierced into told a story of a thousand words. Black veins pulsed into the soil, drying and cracking the land as though a curse was slowly spreading through it. This didn't seem to stop until the phenomena had stretched over ten meters from the location of the pillars of Black Wood.

"Look at you all, already in the Sixth Dimension and yet so afraid of this wood. It doesn't move, it doesn't bite, and yet you mighty Brazingers can't look at it without shivering. I wonder how you'd react if you were in the Third Dimension like my mother?"

Raffyr felt his heart leapt into his throat. Not long ago, he had been planning on making Leonel pay for simply being associated with Aina, a "stain" on their family. And yet, now standing before the woman herself, he couldn't seem to even look her in the eye.

much? I heard that this wood had very unique properties. Regardless of who touches it, the suffering

mind. My man showed me a better way. Your entire family is rotten to the core, it would be better if you all rotted for an eternity together,

a sort of pain that she had dealt with every moment of everyday, and let alone her hands, it had appeared on her face. Just to avoid having to deal with it, for much of her youth, she wore a thin mask over her face, masking

horrible, unbearable pain lessen, but by then it had already been almost two decades. To her, this was absolutely nothing, and seeing the

a normal woman, a frail woman without any sort of special bloodlines or abilities... a common woman of the Third Dimension. And yet they

it had happened, but Aina had enough knowledge now to

and stripped, her mother was strapped too one of these pillars back first after her head was shaved entirely bald, leaving nothing between her and the Black Wood outside of a special cushion between her

at it slowly. It would make it sizzle and crack, a sick

and fat beneath, the curse would have already started eating away at the front of her body like a slowly burning flame, just taking off one layer at a time until she

do its diligent work as it ate through her flesh, peeling

too great and the mortal human body could die even to burns that were too severe, let alone having all of your skin systematically burned away by

rotting flesh could force lucidity and force one to stay alive. At the same time, because the Black Wood didn't

the intricacies of one's expression and the sound of one's voice. Everything from the horrified screeches of pain to the twisting

would be nothing left but a skeleton, a bundle of