In which I act like a grown-up

It was in a jar in a little secret room. I had lost none of my skills with searching and locks, and I was nearly insulted by the simplicity of the safeguards around this artifact. The heart of Darkness turned out to be a black gemstone the size of my fist and cut to resemble a heart. I thought it might be obsidian at first, but it contained deep, smoke facets that made me realize it was something else. Everyone looked at me, expecting me to be the one to grab it. “It’s your mansion,” Qual shrugged.

It was cold to the touch. A chilly numbness shot up my arm to my spine when I touched it, and I felt my heart straining to beat. I felt suspended in time, which I might very well had been, since the others said I opened my eyes after a few seconds. To me, it felt like I was in darkness for an hour. When under the gem’s influence, I could feel the soul of the house calling me, telling me to embrace the darkness. My sanity was under assault, and I could hear the tormented cries of the Rump family going back dozens of generations. Now, it wanted me to join them, to enter the world of undead horror that had trapped the mansion for centuries.

Obviously, that wasn’t an option, but my mind was so clouded with the tormented wailing of the Rumps that I nearly surrendered. But there, in the back of my mind, was another voice. It was a faint little whisper, but it called me back from the abyss. It was not warm, or kind, or reassuring, but it gave me strength nonetheless. It reminded me that I am the master of Tegel Manor, and that the house is mine to command and not the other way around.

Then I opened my eyes. Seconds, they said, but I felt exhausted. We all agreed it was time to go upstairs. No-one wanted to return to the lich. We all knew that the stone should not fall into his hands. Instead, we made our way to the surface, to the little outbuilding where we made our camp. We decided to have a meeting in the morning, when we were all good and healed, to decide what to do with it.

I went for a walk to clear my head, the gem still clutched in my first. Sorel found me on the Cliffside, near where we had kissed.

“Why don’t you just throw it in the ocean?” she asked.

I told her that that would only postpone the problem, and given what had happened to the two of us, we need to look for much longer-term solutions to our problems.

“That’s so unlike you,” she remarked.

“Long term solutions?”

“That, and the fact that you’ve resigned yourself to staying like you are now. The Quinn I knew a week ago would fight tooth and nail to hold on to his masculinity. You would treat this condition like it was the enemy, and you would not rest until you were back to normal.”

I took a deep breath. “Sorel, I didn’t tell you and the others everything.”

“Oh, really?”

“When I touched the gem, I heard the soul of the house calling to me, trying to keep things as they are forever. But there was another voice, one that offered me power. I think it was the voice of whatever changed us into this form.”

“Changed me, you mean. You’re an angel by accident.”

“I don’t think so. Somehow, this feels like there’s a higher power behind it. And while I don’t think that power is good in a good-versus-evil sense, I don’t think it means to harm us.”

“So now you’re an expert?”

“I have a feeling. And I’m more sure about this feeling than I have been about anything else in my life.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“We end the curse tomorrow. But I think I know how it has to be done.”

In which I sort of become a leader and leave my readers with something of a cliffhanger

Well, it was Sorel who finally persuaded me to ease up on Ev and Aleandra. I wasn’t really going to have them fuck each other to death, but they certainly looked at me with something like fear when I finally allowed them to come up for air. “A little respect. That’s all I want. Got it?” I asked. They both nodded silently in reply. Everyone, even Sorel, then kept their distance from me. They all looked at me, as if waiting for me to take charge. I took a deep breath and tried to get things back to normal as much as possible.

“Look, we have two options in front of us. We can either go up to the surface and try to figure out what happened to me. Or we can keep looking for this Heart of Darkness thingy. Truth be told, I’m feeling better than I have in years, so I suppose I could wait on the trip to the surface. Everyone with me?”

Silence. Sorel nodded. They were clearly all afraid of me. This was not good. “Look,” I said. “I know I’ve changed a lot, and I have this crazy power. But I promise I won’t use it on you guys anymore. I may look like a sexy angel, but I’m still Quinn inside.”

“That’s what we’re afraid of,” Qual said. I gave him a look, but true to my word, I did not order him to chop his own dick off. See what a good omnipotent being I am?

Well, compared with some of the other horrors we faced, the dungeon we were now in seemed like child’s play. Ev gave me his short sword for use as a weapon, but I was still effectively unarmored, wearing nothing more than the simple tunic that Aleandra had loaned Golem before. Not that I minded. With my ability to heal instantly, I approached combat with a recklessness I never had before. Even a bite I got from a poisonous snake did not affect me in the slightest. It appears that whatever magic turned Sorel and me into babes also was determined that nothing should mar our beauty…ever. I had always dreamed of one day advancing to godhood from my exploits. Well, now I was as close as I could have dared imagine, but immortality was not exactly what I would have hoped.

At last, we found a teleport room. It took a while to figure the controls out. It sent us all over the dungeon—twice—and it nearly collapsed the boiling lake above on us before we got the thing to work properly. When we did, it took us directly to our target, the resting place of the Heart of Darkness. And I wound up having to make the biggest choice of my life.