Sinners' Kingdom #1: The Book of Lust (Complete)

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The liminal space we entered whenever Lust cast his teleportation always appeared a little differently from before, every time. More detailed, colorful. More hypnotic and alive, like a painted monster come to life. What began as a surreal, dream-like experience became something that now felt even realer than reality—and it terrified me.

The very first time, when Lust spirited us away just as Coven enforcers swarmed on us, the transference had been so overwhelmingly and nauseatingly alien that it was all I could do to not puke my guts out whenever we lurched in and out of reality. The second time had been better, despite being whisked off from the top of a blizzard-ridden mountain in lethally low temperatures while I ran around naked and screaming. And now, for the third time, we melted into the otherworldly dimension that made my body feel like it had been turned inside-out in the most surreal, static-needle-knife-stabbing way.

The curving 'walls' were but solid streaks of multicolored lights all layered over one another in a long, never-ending tunnel, threading in and out like tapestry strands. The ground—was it the ground? or was I upside down and was it actually the ceiling, because that would explain the flipped-turned-twisting pit in my stomach—was a wide, fishbowl-like path of equally uneven, shifting, crystalline formations. The very air, unnaturally hardened, took physical form inside my lungs with every breath, mineralizing or melting, I couldn't know, into something that was neither solid nor liquid nor gas. Bones, muscle, skin, even my hair, nothing felt the way it should, warping with stormy violence as my every cell fought to retain its being. From one second to the next, I was being reshaped and reborn, soft clay molded mercilessly by a thousand different hands. Yet through it all, there was no agony, only the confused quasi-pain of being in the wrong body, wrong skin.

Everything about this place was realer than life, yet more fantastic than any hallucination, something painted not with mere mundane colors but with the explosion of emotions and sensations and threads of a thousand different eternities, things that could never be taken in by the five senses alone.

The dream dimension. Something that humans were never meant to comprehend, much less traverse. This was the place where Lust made his home whenever he haunted the dreams of mortals, slipping into their sleep and entangling himself in the shimmering threads of their consciousness. And the place from where Lust began his dogged haunting of me, too, marking me for this insane, hellish journey from the safety of my bed to the far corners of the world.

And it was far from over. Far, far from over.

The ethereal tunnel quaked with wild tremors, every deep reverberation pulsing through me with sickening force as the walls expanded and shrank with chaotic swells. Smaller fluctuations rippled within massive ones, strong enough to yank me away from Lust and Mammon in the blink of an eye. They both lunged for me in the same instant. Their claws dug into my robe and dragged on the fabric, catching just in time to hook me before I slipped away into the growing storm. I fumbled for their hands, slowed by a jelly-like force that tried to yank my body backwards with invisible, pulsing waves. I tumbled to the ground with a strangled scream, lungs heaving, voice choking, world spinning.

Lust and Mammon dove after me again when the force almost tore me from within the robe's confines. Their grip was truer this time, wrapping around either wrist with bruising strength and a certainty that I would not slip away a second time into nothingness. But gratitude was the last thing on my mind. Just when I thought I had caught my breath, a horrific sensation like I was an ant swallowed up in the shadow of a monstrous mountain crept over me from behind. My throat convulsed, raw with swelling fear, and as I turned to confront the darkness—