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.

”Who knows,” Aina continued, ”maybe it wouldn’t matter much? I heard that this wood had very unique properties. Regardless of who touches it, the suffering is the exact same. It never speeds up or slows down, always moving at its own pace.

”I honestly planned on using this on the woman and the executioners who acted that day, but I think I’ve 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 together, don’t you think?”

Aina lowered her hand from the 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 mask over her face, masking much of it.

It wasn’t until she gained Leonel’s Cleansing Waters did that horrible, 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 the so-called Brazinger geniuses before her, she only felt more disdain and disgust.

Her mother had been nothing more than a normal woman, a frail woman without any sort of special bloodlines or abilities... a common woman of the Third Dimension. And yet they had tied her to this pillar entirely in the nude.

Aina’s father had never described how it had happened, but Aina had enough knowledge now to understand exactly what would have happened.

Beaten and ragged, humiliated and stripped, her mother was strapped too one of these pillars back first after her head was shaved entirely bald, leaving nothing between her and the Black Wood outside of a special cushion between her skull and the pillar.

The Black Wood’s curse would slowly slip onto the 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 it peeled away layer by layer.

By the time it got 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 a time until she was nothing but a husk of bleeding flesh.

The Black Wood wouldn’t sense this at all, only continuing to do its diligent work as it ate through her flesh, peeling away her muscles.

Any normal Third Dimensional existence would have already died by now. 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 burned away by a cruel curse.

However, this was 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 on unrelated flesh, even when there was no longer any flesh on Aina’s mother’s back, she was forced to continue suffering, her nerves and spin remaining perfectly intact.

With the cushion between her skull and the pillar, the last 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 the twisting of one’s expression when sounds could no longer be made were laid out for the entertainment of those watching.

When it was all finished, there would be nothing left but a skeleton, a bundle of nerves and an intact brain.

In that state, one couldn’t see, nor touch, nor hear, nor smell... The only sense remaining was the eerie cold breeze passing over your exposed nerves, back and forth, again and again.

You were forced to endure in that state, trapped in your own mind, until the fumes of your own rotting flesh had dispersed enough that you could finally die. With fail, no matter what the strength of a person was, this would take exactly 99 days, no more, no less.

Then, as though to add insult to injury, your skeleton would be beheaded, your bones ground to ash and then stirred into the mortar that formed the execution platform.

While Aina stood there calmly, recalling all of these matters without the slightest expression on her face, these thoughts continued to run through her head.

She slowly picked up her battle ax, angling it forward toward the enemies before her.

”Come die. You four will be the first, and soon, I’ll make the rest of you follow.