Breaking Point

The whispers became shouts. No longer a choir, more like one voice-young but ancient; heard clear and stern in the vast recess of her skull, distorted and twisted under the whispering influence of the Optic-telling of power, of dominance, of totally obliterating everything that stood in its way.

It tempted her to accept the darkness and cast off the brittle shell of her humanity to become something-well, more. Sleep became a battlefield, where dream and reality slump,\" like an outrageous maelstrom filled with impossible images. She dreamt of colossus statues of black stone, with eyes glowing like hellfire while their faces wrinkled in muted screams. She saw cities reduced to rubble, empires to cinders-all under a baleful glimpse of The Optic.

These were no dreams; they felt like memories, remnants of some horrifying past that, somehow, in some mind-splitting way, she had lived-a past interconnected with the long, dark history of the artifact. Her reflection came to seem a stranger. The sharp and intelligent eyes were now vacated with a fevered intensity, and the once-calm features contorted into a mask of paranoia and obsessive hunger. She moved jerkily, unnatural, and as though the body were no longer hers but the vessel for a malevolent force. The once meticulous scholar-steadfast and methodical-was gone, replaced by a frantic woman, unbridled and unstable, seized with a terrible, terrible need.

Her coworkers, her trusted friends and allies, now appeared like the shadows, lurking about and conspiring against her.

They were talking secrets behind her back. Their glances, their attempts to intervene, only made the paranoia worse, reversing their concern into proof of a grand conspiracy. She saw betrayal at every turn, in every nice gesture, in every word of inquiry. She was accused, lashed out at, and forced everyone away with the ferocity of a cornered animal.

Years of trust in her academic work just fell apart like rotten fascicles, with a corrosive, poisoned suspicion being handed over everything she touched. An apartment that had been her refuge for scholarly activity became her having prison. She shut herself in his apartment, drew curtains, and blocked out the sunlight that had fed her spirit. With eyes wide open, she read ancient texts, their dark scribbles dancing across, into horrific ritual and incantation redolent of whispers echoing inside her mind.

The familiar comforts of her own world faded, overtaken by the suffocating fugue of dread and hammering the appalling visions that pervaded her waking hours. Food became immaterial, sleep her avowed enemy. The only sustenance she seemed to need was the knowledge of The Optic being hailed in as a river pouring through the dark and distressed places of human history and existence. The Optic no longer was an object of study; it was her food, her drug, and her master.

Her body so degraded became, once so healthy and strong, gaunt and pale, along with it corrupted her mind; her garments, formerly elegant, grew muddy and rot-tinged with marks of hasty scribbling and rambling. Her obsession had ceased to be an intellectual curiosity; it unfolded to conquer her completely, transforming what was once normal sane into the horrible caricature of insanity gone mad. The tenuous balance between rationality and rational madness began to crumble.

It was replaced by an ocean of chaos and fear. She was lost in an internal labyrinth constructed from her own darkness, a twisted mirror reflecting the horrible powers of the relic and the horrid shadow they had awakened inside her. One night, with the combination of mind-numbing fatigue and the throes of the Optic coursing in her veins, Emma performed a ritual. She was lost in wild movements, to the fevered dancing directed by murmuring demons pulsing in her head.

She sang in a tongue no mortals knew, through larynx torn and scratchy, her body shivering, as she traced symbols of such demonic power on the floor of her apartment, symbols that seemed to twist and crackle on the very surface. An unseen spark frizzled through the air. The shadows in the corners writhed, expanding into angry, monstrous shapes. She felt the barrier between the real world and the unknown fracturing.

As if the Optic itself reacted. It pulsed with malice, its surface gleaming with an unholy glow. The images came more vivified right now, less into blips. They were more coherent as if she stared into the dark future where The Optic ran with extreme authority, a future of her own making. The weight of that power, that responsibility, or was it a curse, was almost unbearable. It crushed her, not in body, but in soul, disassembling her into a husk, a mere reflection of the woman lost in darkness. In that instant of full-fledged mental and spiritual collapse, she cracked. She didn't scream; there were no moans or tortured cries.

A cold calm ensconced her. The eyes filled with fear and despair-now empty, unflinching, a hideously blank tableau that reflected the abyss that had opened up within her. It was the breaking point.

Her identity shattered into pieces and replaced by utter desolation. No more was she Emma Taylor, the world-renowned archaeologist. Instead, she was a vessel, a conduit for the big evil power of The Optic, which had eaten away her very soul with stomach-hungry vitality. This was beyond madness; this was transformation, a shifting into some monster, some inhuman. Rationality, empathy, and humanity had been flayed from her, leaving a chill, cool detachment that was part ancient, part musty evil. There was no distinction between Emma and The Optic anymore; they were one with each other.

Her colleagues discovered her apartment-there was no other word for it-in a state of utter disarray, with a dense, heavy silence permeating it. Sightless pages from thousand-year-old tomes lay scattered on the floor, sprinkled with what resembled dried blood and alongside were burnt diagrams and symbols, suggestive of some unthinkable rituals. On a makeshift altar, The Optic poured a cold, malevolence energy, blinking with a diabolical light while Emma sat in the very center of the room, unmoving, eyes fixed into the void, a mask of total indifference. No fright, no remorseful inclinations, pain: just an airy, eerie stillness that signified a mind that had fully met its end; a soul was completely contorted. There was no returning to sanity. The once-famous archaeologist had become a living embodiment of the artifact's terrifying power, the true testament to the corrupting force of obsession and the ever-sweet temptations of forbidden knowledge. The shadow of obsession had swallowed her whole, transforming her into some combination of horror and melancholia.

It wasn't mere madness, but a shatter into soul void, into the open optic of haunting corruption.

She was now the owner of an ancient artifact. That marked her passing into a point of no return. A chill went down her spine; the real horror had only started. The weight of the knowledge that The Optic had given her was no longer a burden but became her essence. The ancient lore, the forgotten rites, the forbidden power – all had been imprinted in her very being, irreversibly changing her nature and converting her into a vessel for unspeakable horror. Memories of her past lives welled up in her, lapsing into the indistinguishable between her own memories and ancient history in the wicked power of The Optic.

She felt the rage, the grief, the pain of those having lived, as they were her very feelings: all woven into a fascinating tapestry of suffering flowing through time. She stared at her hands, ghostlike in their pale conditions; they were not her hands at all! They represented dark force and an embodiment of untold acts. The thought triggered neither joy nor horror, just a statement of fact: an observation that reflected the chilly indifference replacing her humanity. The Optic's power flowed in her blood like a malicious current, governing her mind, her wishes, and her very being. She was not a scholar, a woman, or a human being.

She was but a medium, a vessel for an ancient and vile force, and the world was doomed to pay for her obsession. What had once tortured her perceptions were now commands sounding in the cavernous void of her once possessed soul. They spoke of conquering the world, of dominion and unleashing a depth of darkness unfathomable by others. And in the dark depths of her changed consciousness, Emma knew, with a certainty more powerful than a reason and deeper than emotion, that this was only the beginning.

The descent It had been a long and torturous road, but the real horror was yet to reveal itself. The Optic was awake; with it came a power that threatened to engulf the Earth. Sanity shattered, her soul gone, the transformation was complete. She was ready.