[Center][H2]Feb 7 2020
Day Two[/H2][/Center]

Then, like a mist being swept away by the wind, I felt Maleftos’ influence recede. ‘Fifteen minutes, huh?’ I thought to myself. Well I can do a lot with fifteen minutes.

Staring into my soul, I saw the very canal that I had just emerged from. I swore I would never take in the dread again and that was true, I absolutely will not. Seeing my corpses lain about in the stream never fails to make me uncomfortable. Having just been reborn though, I reached out to the freshest one, a vacant body only hours old. This would suit my purposes better than the others.

Having only fourteen minutes to prepare myself for Mal’s Bullshit Barrage, I drug the fresh corpse out of the canal and over to a nearby altar, the very altar that I had lain upon before my first undoing. I had burnt myself for the sake of others many times, even many times more than I had been taken under by the all consuming dread that threads itself through my life.

Thirteen minutes remained. My toolkit was a ways away. While it was probably possible that I could retrieve it in as little as three, that would also cost me an additional three minutes on the return, leaving me only seven minutes for my rituals. No. Maybe it could work, but it’d probably be optimal to just get my hands dirty. Ho hum.

Thinking it through had cost me another of my precious minutes. So, with twelve remaining, I peeled the eyes of my prior self open. I had to part the eyelids with nails, seeing as laying face down in the dread had caused the damnable fluid to congeal into a viscous substance. Not unlike glue. Kissing my self on the forehead, I set my hands over his ears and sat him upright.

“You were a good man, Arnie. A brave man. You deserved better. Don’t worry,” I advised myself, just as much as I was speaking to my other self, “We’ll have better. Just take a deep breath and let me take the wheel. Sometimes to make an omelette,” I hiss, placing my right hand on the forehead and the other upon the back of his neck. “you have to break a few,” I drove my right hand downward, like a twelve-year old playing Whack-A-Mole. Seeing the scarlet, borderline blackened, spatter, I inflated my lungs, needing the air in spite of the literally dreadful stench, “Skulls.”

Clocks ticking. Nine minutes left. So I handily parted the skull at the sagittal suture, like a DVD case, before reaching inside, sweeping out a metric fuckton of cerebrospinal fluid and eventually working my fingers around the occipital lobe. Bingo. I flapped my fingers to and fro before gently persuading it to secede from its cerebral union. Yes. And out it came. My hand coated in the dreadful ooze that eeked its way out of the brain. I held it up to the sun: beholding it as a beekeeper would his honeycomb.

Six minutes left until Bullshit Barrage and I still haven’t even begun the ritual. Hopefully Maleftos doesn’t have any of my more powerful inner demons on speed dial or I am totally fucked.