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.

I heard that this wood had very unique properties. Regardless of who touches it, the suffering is the exact same. It never

changed my 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

everyday,

two decades. To her, this was absolutely nothing, and seeing the fear on the faces of the so-called Brazinger geniuses before her, she only felt

a normal woman, a frail woman without any sort of special bloodlines or abilities... a

how it had happened, but Aina had enough knowledge now to understand exactly what

her mother was strapped too one of these pillars back first after her head was shaved entirely bald, leaving nothing

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

beneath, the curse would have already started eating away at the front of her body like a slowly burning

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

The shock would be too great and the mortal human body could die even to burns that were too severe, let alone having all of your skin systematically

force one to stay alive. At the same time, because the Black Wood didn't work on bone nor nerves, but only on unrelated flesh, even when there was no longer any flesh on Aina's mother's back, she was forced to

the intricacies of one's expression and the sound of one's voice. Everything from the horrified screeches of pain to the twisting of one's expression when sounds could no longer

left but a skeleton, a bundle of nerves