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.

that this wood had very unique properties. Regardless of who touches it, the suffering is the exact same. It never speeds up or slows

I've changed my mind. My man showed me a

tree, the rotting flesh on the palm of her hand not moving her in the slightest. This was 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

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

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

never described how it had happened, but Aina had

was shaved entirely bald, leaving nothing between her and

skin of her back, eating away at it slowly. It would make it sizzle and crack, a sick burning sensation piercing into

to her muscles 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

sense this at all, only continuing to do its diligent work as it

mortal human body could die even

the truly sickening ability of the Black Wood, the scent it created from rotting flesh could force lucidity and force one to stay alive. At the same time, because the Black Wood didn't work on bone nor nerves, but only

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

left but a skeleton, a bundle