Hez stood in front of the corrupted artifact, gripped her carnation rod in both of her hands and raised her arms. Just then, a magic symbol drew itself beneath her feet. It was an interlocking heptagram with a white carnation in the center with circles surrounding the star with nonsensical runes repeatedly spelling out the word ‘anjelier’. Seven planetary symbols were etched, one in each point, in the order of the days of the week – the Sun for Sunday, the Moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, and so on. It was a symbol of much-needed balance and harmony in this chaotic world.

Just then, the sound of a million buzzing bees rushed through Hez’s head. She struggled to cope with the miasma as she purified the artifact. She squeezed her eyes shut as memories that weren’t her own flowed into her mind. The images jumped everywhere, but she knew these horrible sensations didn’t belong to her. The sights she witnessed were terrifying.

One set of images belonged to a woman who always stared at herself in the mirror. The woman herself was dangerously underweight, but the figure in the mirror was equally obese. Another group of dreams belonged to a welterweight champion who was fervently exercising on his bike, riding across a road that had no end in sight, determined to reach a number at the end that never got any closer. The third set of visions came from a young girl who was attracted to fashion magazines and aspired to become a model, surrounded by make-up, jewelry, dresses, swimsuits and stacks upon stacks of well-read magazines.

With these visions, Hez was able to identify the source of the negative energy; none of these people wanted to eat because they wanted to lose weight for one reason or another. In other words, all of them were anorexics. That explained the rotting food in this absurd dungeon – since no one wanted to eat, the food was left to go bad. However, what surprised her was that the artifact – now identified as a digital weight scale – originally belonged to the first woman, but because all three of them shared the same disorder, the other two dreamers were attracted to the artifact and meshed their thoughts with the woman’s, thus creating this freak chimera dungeon. If the team hadn’t come, their combined anorexia would have gotten much worse upon waking up.

Hez didn’t want that to happen. She prayed harder, wanting to convey to these people that she didn’t want them to suffer anymore. She raised her flower rod over the scale and let a few silvery petals flutter over it, transferring her purifying magic onto the artifact. The petals immediately dissipated the miasma like liquid soap dripping onto grease. Gradually, the two forces canceled each other out. The monsters lost their energy and melted back into heaps of rotting food. All that was left was the source of this madness; the scale.

Hez opened her eyes. Her rod transformed back into her mantle and fit itself back around her shoulders. The girl looked empty and exhausted. She lost consciousness and collapsed backwards.