Within the mind of Lamphrey, Ethan's eyes opened.

But he did not see the Waking World.

Instead, he, in his hat form, was floating in the middle of the same cosmic abyss he'd melted into when he made contact with Jun'Ei's mind. The sensation was also the same. It was a strange mix of motion and stagnation, the kind of feeling you got when you were walking drunk up a long flight of stairs. Every breath he drew, every ruffle of his tatty tip, and every blink of his crimson eyeball was labored.

The void was formless - an intangible mass that cried out a him with a thousand different voices, some of which he vaguely seemed to recognize, even if he couldn't put a name to them.

He couldn't be sure, but it felt like these voices were speaking directly to him as he flew through the formless void.

And slowly, he began to understand what they were - they were voices still to come. Voices of the future:

People want to have a purpose. A Path to Walk. A Path that's their Path.

As long as someone sits up there, we can never be free.

We shall stand for your world, my Lord. And when we fall, we shall take your enemies with us.

...but its not him I'm afraid of.

I wonder, when the time comes...will you fulfill your end of our bargain?

It is not up to us to determine right or wrong. All we ensure is flow.

I don't deserve your devotion.

SELFISH FOOL!

You've known all along, you just didn't want to believe it...*

Just as he was trying to interpret what these statements might mean, a single starry walkway appeared in front of him, beckoning him towards a certain point at its end. He flew down that hallway, watching the receding darkness at its end. As he flew, propelled by nothing but his own will, he saw four other cosmic panels appear in his peripheral vision, attaching themselves to the walkway to create a hall that went on and on into eternity.

Paintings lined each wall. They came into view as Ethan began to speed up. He could just make out each one as he past it by – his life on earth, images of him in the mine where he'd first met Theo, his flight from Artorious with Fauna, Klax and Tara – all the way up to his final triumph over Artorious in the Battle of Sanctum.

Curiously, each painting was labeled with these words. And what was even more curious was that this fact did not seem to surprise him in the slightest.

This was the mind of Lamphrey – of a woman who had spent all her life in a kind of transient state, hopping between two worlds, Waking and Lucid, past and future, real and unreal – now Ethan was here seeing the world as she saw it: as a snapshot of images. Pictures that when put together flowed like images on an old-timey film reel. They flowed together until they became one thing – one mosaic that displayed all of time itself.

He had to shake his mind free of the notion that he could comprehend it all. Instead, he focused on reaching the end of the hall, whizzing by more pictures that he'd seen in Lamphrey's visions before. Images of his past lives – of Archons born and dead – sped away from him as he began rocketing towards the end of the star-gilded hallway.

His sense of space began to waver. Now, he did begin to glance left and right, but caught nothing but color whizz by him. Hues of black, shades of green, blotches of purple and many, many flashes of red. Crimson, blood-soaked red.

He willed himself forward again. Now, all color started to die away. The hallways twisted and bent around him. All space became distorted and faded. It was like he was being thrown down a chute that was taking him out of reality – somewhere far, far from whatever defined whatever 'reality' was, if such a being really existed at all.

Now he couldn't even be sure of his own material existence anymore. His vision blurred more and more and his eye narrowed, tunnel vision kicking in until the end of the corridor was all he could see. That area of inky blackness, dead space, suddenly became the single most important thing in the entire world: a blank canvas.

To get there he knew he had to focus. He had to try to control the power rumbling within this mind. Already he could feel his hold on Lamphrey beginning to slip. Like she was warning him. Like he wasn't yet ready…

But I have to be, he told himself. No one else is. It's all on me. The hope of a future for Argwyll is in my hands. And you're going to show me what I can do with all that. You're going to show me what you saw in the dreams of those who looked beyond. Because I'm the last Archon. I'm all you've got left.

He resisted the urge to close shut his eye to the darkness that he was quickly approaching. Something about it was ugly. Evil – like a mimic drawing him towards its hidden teeth, luring him with the promise of a future.

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But he blocked that thought out. Instead, he focused. He got specific.

Future, he said. Argwyll. Enemy. The Enemy, Lamphrey.

The four walls of the hallway began to split apart.

The Enemy, he repeated emphatically. Show me the one I must be ready for. Show me the Enemy!

And then, almost before he'd even finished the thought, he saw what lay at the end of the corridor.

His momentum slowed, and he came to a stop before the largest canvas in the whole gallery.

Only it wasn't a canvas at all.

It was a mirror.

…what?

It was definitely a mirror. The black, reflective surface showed him something that looked familiar and yet had an alien air about it. He was looking into a face that didn't look like his. And yet, it was his face.

His human face.

He looked exactly as he remembered himself on that fateful day when his life on earth had come to an abrupt end. His face, clean shaven and pallid, was that same face he saw on that morning when the sheer pointlessness of his life had become all too much. His shaggy, scraggly hair needed cut something awful, and he never had gotten around to it. He was even wearing the same black nylon jacket that allowed him to slip seamlessly into the streets of his hometown unnoticed and uncared for.

But the things that were truly alien were his eyes.

They seemed the same sunken beady affairs he'd always had at first, though to look at them made him flinch. He was so used to the imposing crimson of his demon-eye that he couldn't believe he'd put up with those dismal little things for so long.

As this thought came to him, he suddenly began to notice the odd green hue that was fanning into life around the sockets. A line of acidic green coated his eyelids, sliding down to circle his tear ducts. Then, in silence, they burst into a vibrant green flame that coated both his eyes completely.

He wanted to look away. But his mind forced him to meet the fiery gaze that had overtaken his old self. Was this a warning of a possible future? Or was this some odd metaphor for what all the madness of his progress in Argwyll meant?

Suddenly all thoughts were shattered as his old human self stretched its mouth into a slitted smirk – one that spoke of pure, primal hatred. It was a face he didn't even know he could make. It looked as though his old form in the mirror was – laughing at him?

He tried to reach out to it. He strained himself, trying to will a thready pair of hands into existence so he could grab his former self, furious burning eyes and all, and ask it what all this madness meant.

But he saw the face twist as he tried. As he closed the distance between them, his hat-form only an inch or two away from the reflective surface, his human form's green eyes blazed in fury. It leaned back, formed one hand into a fist, and punched right through the glass.

Ethan gasped a soundless gasp as the entire cosmic hallway disintegrated instantly. He fell away, down into Argwyll below, watching his human body snarl at him with hate as he dropped to the planet's surface. He twisted in the air, feeling the searing heat of atmospheric pressure tear and bake his thready skin and hatty bowels. He wanted to close his eye and force himself back to the Waking World – back to a knowable reality that didn't come with such intense, continuous pain.

But once again he was compelled to keep his eye firmly open. Because, as he rocketed down to Argwyll's surface, he saw a sight that didn't make any sense.

Thousands of Hybrids marched against the humans on the surface of the planet. Entire armies, bearing banners depicting a crimson eye – his crimson eye – raged across the world in a campaign of eradication eerily similar to what the humans had a century ago. The only difference was in the blindness of their devotion. Ethan was granted visions of the bloody battles they fought across Westerweald's border and across the ashen dunes of the Gobrin desert towards Eastmarch, ransacking entire towns and villages as they went.

Yet what particularly perturbed him about these visions was the faces of the Hybrids as they marched against his foes. Their eyes were glazed, their bodies stiff, and as each limb struck out at warrior and civilian alike in a manner that seemed disjointed and uncoordinated. The armies moved as though they were a mass of zombies puppeted by some unknown collective consciousness.

And that's when he realized what he was seeing – armies of Hybrids who had been possessed by him. Armies of Hybrids whose Spirit Cores and Skills he had stolen.

Armies of Hybrids who had become little more than dutiful, mindless husks. An army of living dead.

But my possession has never…he thought, trying to form the idea in his mind that his Possession skill could actually impair the mental faculties of Hosts. It had never done so to any previous form he'd inhabited. Had it?

Suddenly his view shifted, and he was back in the air just above Argwyll, watching the clouds past by listlessly on a bright autumn morning. The world seemed oddly at peace – a fact that his mind simply wouldn't allow him to believe despite what his eye was showing him.

And as it turned out, he was right.

For in the next moment, the skies darkened over the world, and Ethan watched the verdant greens of Westerweald burn up to a crisp as an all-consuming green inferno washed over them. He watched the oceans of the Northern hemisphere boil and bubble, and then evaporate entirely. He watched the industrial centers of Eastmarch crumble as the fire engulfed them – taking the glorious spires of Kaedmon with it. From North to South, East to West, the fire burned and raged as though it were a virus spreading throughout every living thing in the world. The plants of Triant shriveled up and died. The spires of Lucent melted away. And once the surface of Argwyll had been sheared away by the cleansing flames, the underworld revealed itself.

Ethan saw the Hybrids of Sanctum run in terror as the lambent hellfire washed over them, turning their screams of ash and their bodies to dust which it then swept away. Sanctum died all over again, and with it the hope of the Hybrids. He saw Fauna, Klax, Tara, Mara and all the rest – he saw them try to resist with all the magic and skills they could muster. And he saw them fall, one by one, in a kaleidoscope of cataclysm.

Only one place remained untouched by this apocalypse. One single, floating island in the middle of what had now become a barren husk of a planet, its energy entirely consumed and siphoned away to a spot in this last fragment of Argwyll.

Ethan's eye widened as he recognized the place from Jun'Ei's prophecy: Mistborne Isle.

There, a creature rose from the dust and echoes of the fallen planet. Its eyes, green and envious of the world's beauty, betrayed a soul that had wanted it to burn – to take all the energy from the world and store it within itself. Ethan didn't even have to see the rest of the creature to know what it was. Who it was.

Instead, the creature rising from the isle looked up at him. Upon its face was spread the exact same smirk it had before.

It said nothing as Ethan plummeted right towards its open mouth. And before he felt the jaws of his human self crunch around him, his mind raced to understand what Lamphrey had just shown him – the fact that she'd known perhaps all along.

The real enemy of Argwyll – the only being who could ensure its absolute destruction – it was not the Lightborn, or Kaedmon, or any of the humans who hated who he was.

The enemy was him.

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