I didn't know how to feel about this.

The day after the revelations from Mother and Freya had dawned bright and warm. A fresh breeze blew in from the east, which kept the temperature from reaching that oppressive heat that often ruined beautiful days like this. A few wisps of cotton-white clouds wandered lazily across the sky, and there was an air of peacefulness around the island.

Of course, the fact that everybody in our group woke up completely lucid, most of them looking to me for answers, threw a bit of a spanner in the works. The decision was made - although I had no idea by whom - that we should head to the lake and talk there. I wasn't complaining. That was still one of my favorite spots on the island so far.

A little while later, I was beginning to question my new reality. Hayley's fingers were working through the knots in my shoulders while Liz and Robyn knelt between my knees, sharing my cock between them. Hannah was sitting between Amy's legs, the older woman softly stroking the younger's nipples while Katie openly played with herself watching. Off on the other side of the lake, Ray was being fawned over lewdly by Caroline and Zoe, while Tom and Louisa had snuck off somewhere more private.

Even completely lucid, the girls who had attached themselves to me, even Katie, the most distant of them all, had still clung to me on our way here and after we had arrived. I sat on a rock close to the outlet of the lake. Hayley was standing behind me and running her fingers over my shoulders, working out the stress that I had been holding there since this whole thing began, every now and then leaning forward to plant a kiss at the back of my neck. Hannah and Robyn were on either side of me, both leaning affectionately against me and both wandering their fingers over me. Katie, Amy, and Liz were all close by.

I had expected them to be a little more distant than normal, their new "presence" in reality tempering their usual affection. But instead, they seemed to be even more so than usual. Hayley had insisted on holding my hand on the walk here, her and Hannah gushing happily about being pregnant with my babies, and Robyn especially had been flashing me some very hungry looks.

On the other side of the river leading to the sea sat Ray. Caroline was sitting next to him. It was amazing to me that even with her breasts completely covered, I could now tell her apart from Zoe. I had no idea how, but I could see the differences between them as clear as day. For her part, Zoe was sitting between Ray's legs and leaning back against him. The discomfort, mistrust, and self-consciousness that blighted our first mass-lucidity moment were well and truly gone.

Despite the comfort and affection being shown around the lake, it was Tom and Lousia who seemed to be the closest. Not needing outward displays of affection, the ease with which they enjoyed each other's company was glaringly obvious. They simply sat together in the shallows, Louisa's hand in Tom's and his thumb stroking absently over the back of it. There was the softest of happy smiles on her face, and Tom - showing his total comfort with her - had no trouble whatsoever meeting her eyes.

"So, are we going to talk about the elephant in the room?" Amy finally broke the silence.

All eyes turned to me.

"Fuck!"

"Alright, what do you want to know?" I asked with a sigh.

"Let's start with 'everything' and go from there." Zoe laughed as she nuzzled back into Ray. The rest of the group just nodded.

I groaned loudly and pinched the bridge of my nose. I was having a hard time understanding everything on my own, trying to explain it all to a group of people; their range of knowledge ranging from most of it to none, sounded like it could form its own ring of hell. A ripple of teasing laughter at my frustration rippled around the lake. Out of everyone, Ray and Tom knew the most, followed by Amy and - by necessity - Louisa. Over the past few weeks, I had "woken" almost all of them and explained as much of the situation as I could; that amount varied greatly depending on how much time we had to talk and how much I knew myself at the time. Constantly working in fear of Mother hadn't helped matters, but I was confident that was a problem I wouldn't have any more.

With a deep breath, I started from the very beginning. It was, as Julie Andrews pointed out, a very good place to start. It was hard to believe that we had been on the Island for less than two months, and this had all begun after only a few days, the day we had all passed out and woken up in this very spot. I couldn't help but cast a glance over to the wooded area where I had dragged Robyn and Hayley immediately after it. Robyn caught the look and flashed me a naughty wink. There was a molten heat behind her eyes, more fierce than anything I had seen before.

For the most part, the group remained quiet as I explained everything that had happened. I told them everything. There were parts, especially the events described by Dr. Walker's recording, that I knew would scare them. But they deserved the truth. I had, it would have seemed, fallen into something of a protective mindset with all of them, but they were not children. They needed to know what was happening to them and around them.

Faces of varying expressions stared back at me, listening raptly as I went through the past few weeks' events. Through it all, Hayley didn't stop her attention on my shoulders, although her fingers faltered a few times.

A tense silence fell upon the group after I finished.

"Let me get this straight," Liz tilted her head after a few quiet minutes. She had been one of the women who had been woken the least out of my group and had been hearing a lot of this for the first time. "We are all here specifically to be bred by you because our children, or grandchildren, or whatever, will be great leaders in some war against the other gods."

"Err, there is a little more to it than that. But yes, basically."

Liz shivered visibly, "Fuck, that's hot!"

"But what about us?" Zoe asked. "I mean, we're not... you know... with you."

"Turns out Ray's progeny are important too, and Tom's."

Zoe looked up at Caroline and then over to Liz. "Yeah, that is hot. We were destined to make you a Daddy, baby." She finished with a grin to Ray.

Ray groaned comically. "Little Rays. God help us all."

"Or Goddesses," grinned Caroline.

"I think they've done enough," he snorted.

"Not yet, they haven't," Robyn purred as she winked up at me.

"They seem to be doing fine to me," Hayley laughed with a twinkle in her eyes.

Liz pulled a faux pouty face and rested her hand on her belly. "I'm not so sure about that; I haven't had a baby fucked into me yet."

"That you know of," Amy grinned at her. "For all you know, that oven could be cooking a bun right now. Those two lucky bitches," she nodded at Hayley and Hannah with a grin, "probably got knocked up within a day or two of getting here. They are over a month along now."

"But it was weeks until I got him to fuck me!" Liz complained loudly, still pretending to sulk.

"So it will be that much longer 'til we find out. Assuming he has put one in you yet."

"So what you are saying," Robyn purred, "is that we should keep fucking his brains out just to be sure."

Amy's mischievous grin grew a little wider. "Oh yes, I think that any of you ladies wanting to become pregnant should be taking every opportunity to milk your man."

"Good enough for me!" Robyn beamed and stood from her place next to me and hooked a leg over my waist to straddle me.

"Are you lot sure you are all lucid?" I asked around a gasp as Robyn's weight settled onto the quickly growing tent in my pants.

"Oh, shush. Do you think men have a monopoly on being sexual creatures? Now, you are gonna fuck your cum into me, got it?"

"Then me!" Liz chirped up

"I want some too!" Hannah purred.

"You've already been knocked up, ya greedy bitch!" Katie teased.

"That doesn't mean we don't want some of that dick." Hannah giggled back.

I cast a glance over to Ray, looking for a bit of male solidarity and maybe getting back to the subject I felt hadn't been covered in anywhere near enough detail. But it would seem he was having problems of his own. Zoe and Caroline had straddled a leg each and were grinding themselves onto him while taking turns kissing him hungrily.

Tom and Lousia were nowhere to be seen.

This was the moment I began to wonder how I should feel about all of this.

In the time it had taken me to glance around the lake, Hayley's fingers had started to work me a little more firmly, their owner clearly enjoying the show as Robyn yanked my shorts off, pulled the strings of her bikini bottoms loose, and impaled herself on me in a single downward motion. A long, deep, drawn-out groan spilled from her lips as a pair of hands - possibly Liz's - pulled Robyn's top up and over her head to spill out her pert little breasts.

I was barely paying attention. My entire world had condensed down to the feeling of indescribable heat and tightness around my manhood and the fingers working so deftly on my shoulders. A hand had reached under Robyn's bouncing and gyrating ass to start rubbing over my balls. They had gone from entirely uninterested in sex - given the seriousness of the conversation - to full, heavy, and more than ready in a few short minutes. The hand caressing and tugging at them was speeding that process along nicely.

Robyn started to bounce. Deep, hard, and primal ruts where she slammed her hips down with increasing urgency. It had been a few days since I had last been with her, and apparently, she was feeling it.

Her eyes were glazed over, not in the way I had been used to seeing over the past few months, but this time in pure carnal lust. Her lips were parted, and the groans from her lips were becoming higher in pitch and harder in urgency. I could feel the fluttering and tremble from her pussy as she already approached the first of what would be several highs. I was well aware of these girls' appetites, and Robyn was about as veracious as they came.

Hayley, who seemed to be relishing her position as my "girlfriend," was not only more than happy to share my time but, judging by the steadily increasing pressure of her fingers, was enjoying the show immensely.

My eyes were open, but my ability to process the visual stimuli was being hampered by the mind-melting pressure coming from Robyn's heat getting tighter around my cock. She was clenching her muscles so hard that even I could tell that it was a deliberate gesture. She was trying to milk me; she desperately wanted to feel the flood of me empty into her. She craved it, needed it, and was downright demanding it even if her ability to talk was being overwhelmed by the louder squeals and grunts falling from her lips.

I felt movement to the side of me, a set of larger breasts being pressed against my ribs before warm lips and hot breath washed over the side of my throat.

Fuck, these girls knew exactly how to press my buttons.

My cock lurched hard at the new sensation, and judging by the gasp and the suddenly harder bounces, Robyn felt it too. She was now hammering her hips onto me. The loud, wet slaps of our coupling rippled over the lake's water as we raced towards our mutual high together.

"Yes, cum for him, baby," a female voice softly said from the other side of me. My mind was too occupied to let me work out who it belonged to. "Look at him; look how much he loves your pretty little pussy. He wants to fuck his baby into you. He wants to make you a mom. Cum for him."

"Oh god!" Robyn panted. "I'm going to cum. Fuck, please, Dan, fill me up! Holy shit! I'm going to...."

A scream ripped through the air. Robyn slammed down, and I braced myself for the clamp of her sex onto me, for the urgent convulsions that would pull me over the edge and suck every drop into her.

But it never came.

Even Hayley's fingers had stopped.

Through my unfocused vision, I could see Robyn instinctively covering her chest as she, along with Hannah to the side of me, looked over toward Ray's group with expressions of utter horror. I tried to blink my sight clear and leaned to the side to see what was going on.

Zoe and Caroline were scrambling backward through the water. Caroline was running, but Zoe was almost lying on her back, kicking her legs and clawing at the silt to get away from him. What looked to be three deep claw marks had raked down her side, and the skin from just below the swell of her breast to just above her hip was leaking dark crimson into the water.

Something was very wrong.

And it only took one look toward where Ray had been sitting to see what it was.

I knew what Ray looked like. Over the past few months, I had spent more time with him and the others than I had with any other person since I was an infant. Even my marriage to Sarah had been punctuated by work and our respective social lives. I had been with these people for twenty-four hours a day for months. I knew every single line and feature on his face as well as I knew my own. And one fact was unmistakable.

The thing I was looking at was not Ray.

He... it... whatever it was, was wearing Ray like a skin. The thing staggered to its feet like it was not used to being in the shape of a human; every movement and gesture was more like a nervous twitch. Its neck and head tilted and twisted as if having a minor seizure, its shoulders jerked, and flutters of muscle rippled under the skin of its chest. Its arms looked too long for its body, Ray's original skin stretching dangerously tight over the sinewy muscles and fibers beneath it and his enormous hands - the skin there torn and shredded - ending in five, eight-inch long claws. One of which was still stained by the blood and tattered flesh from Zoe's ribs.

His skin was a deathly pawl of grey, like the clouds on an overcast autumn day, but what really stood out, even over the gaunt and hollow torso, was his face. Everything about it was wrong. His cheeks looked drawn and dark, his hairline seemed to have moved several inches further up his forehead, and his nose seemed to have shrunk. Worse were his eyes. His bottom eyelid had folded over itself, creating a bright red ring around his bloodshot whites, which looked to be almost bugging out of their sockets.

His mouth, however, was, somehow, truly terrifying.

It was far too big for his face. The corners of his lips reached high onto his cheekbones in a grotesque and malevolent-looking grin, one filled with nothing except evil intent. But when his lips curled back into a macabre imitation of a smile, I could see that Ray's pearly whites had morphed into yellow-crusted, sharpened fangs.

By the time I had taken all this in, Zoe and Caroline had scrambled back toward us. Katie and Amy, the first to react, had rushed out and started dragging Zoe toward the shore, either ignoring or not recognizing the danger they were now in. The creature's head snapped toward them, a jerky, twitchy motion that was almost too fast for the eye to see. Robyn lifted off me in a heartbeat, and I shot to my feet, scooping her, Hannah, and Liz protectively behind me with Hayley.

The motion seemed to draw the creature's attention away from the mad dash by Amy and Katie to pull Zoe clear. But as soon as his eyes locked onto me, his whole expression changed. The only way to describe it is by comparing how a predator looks at prey to how a cornered tiger looks at a threat. The look he gave the girls was almost akin to amusement, as if he was studying them before the strike that would end them. The look he shot at me, however, was pure, undiluted hostility. It was rage. I was not a meal to be feasted on but an enemy on the battlefield to be vanquished.

He launched himself at me in a series of gestures and movements almost too fast for the eye to follow. The human body was not made to move at those speeds; Ray's drum-tight skin was already stretched to breaking point, but with the sudden increase in pressure as the muscles moved in ways they were never designed to handle, long, jagged tears ripped themselves along his arms, legs and across his already taut chest.

He covered half the distance between us in the space of only a few terrified heartbeats, his arm drawing back to deliver a strike that I had no doubt would kill me. As tattered as those muscles were, as they clung onto the bones of his arm, there was undeniable power in them. Fight or flight is a powerful motivator, but not exactly one that is hard to overcome; Flight would have meant leaving the women to their fates, and fighting would mean mine. It didn't matter; there was no time to do anything. I just closed my eyes and prepared for the inevitable end.

Nothing happened.

The sounds around me seemed to stop. The screams of fear from the women behind me, the screams of pain from Zoe as she was dragged to the perceived safety of the shore, the splashing of the water as the creature formerly known as Ray lunged closer.

But still, nothing happened.

I felt myself frown. They say that lots of people were dead before they even realized it. Before they felt a thing. Although it was much better than the alternative, I didn't really feel dead. For one thing, my feet were still wet from standing in the lake. It wasn't the biggest hang-up in history, but if I was dead now, that meant my feet would stay wet, and spending eternity with wet feet didn't sound like something to look forward to. Maybe this was that 'life flashing before your eyes thing.' I doubted having my eyes closed would affect that, and I wasn't too bothered about missing it. I'd been there for most of it and wasn't enormously impressed the first time around. I decided to wait a little longer.

Something still stubbornly refused to happen.

I huffed and peeked open an eye.

Four inches from my face were four very sharp, very dangerous-looking, and very frozen, blood-soaked talons. I squinted at them. I could almost see the air currents rippling around the bone-like blades as they slashed toward my head in a blow that would probably have cleaved it in half. Or into slices... I don't know... that sort of logic was shoved aside by the unmistakable fact that they were frozen in mid-air. As was everything else around it. In fact, with a careful and hesitant look around the clearing, it was apparent that the only thing not caught in this snapshot moment in time was me.

I took a single large step backward, out of the swing of the creature, just in case my current state of fortune ended and the scything claw decided to start scything again. Truth be told, keeping my head there seemed like a rather bad idea.

Safely out of immediate harm, I felt a little more comfortable looking around properly. Ray's face - or, more accurately, the face of the creature currently inhabiting Ray's body - was twisted into a snarl of pure contemptuous rage. There was a hatred, an utter loathing, behind those bloodshot eyes. His dagger-like teeth had sliced through part of his lip as it curled back into the perpetual dangerous grimace it now wore.

But it was the sight beyond it that truly convinced me that this moment really was caught in time. Katie and Amy were dragging Zoe out of the lake, the spray and droplets of water, much of it stained crimson by the jagged wound along Zoe's ribs, hung in mid-air. Caroline seemed to be levitating, too, her stride frozen in time as she ran toward the three of them while her terrified eyes watched Ray's attack on me. The four women behind me were recoiling away from the sudden onset of violence, but in a gesture that immediately endeared her to me even more than she already was, Hayley was reaching for me while the other dragged her back. The suspended deluge around their feet was frozen in the air like the rest of the scene.

Even the waterfall, with its mosaic of droplet-refracted light, was just hanging there. Locked in that moment in time.

It was very offputting.

I scratched my head and turned my attention back to the creature formerly known as Ray. Ray was always a big guy, I was hardly small, and he was still a little bigger than me, but his distorted body now towered over mine. As torn and shredded as his skin was, the muscles beneath them held an undeniable power, and those talons looked big enough to eviscerate an ox. I could handle myself in a fight, but even I knew my limits.

So, options... Running was the most obvious one. Dragging the girls one by one to the safety of the bunker and barricading ourselves in. It would take some doing, though. More than that, I had no idea how long this whole frozen-time thing was going to last, and knowing my luck, it would unfreeze when I was a mile away, leaving the girls yet to be moved at the mercy of Ray.

Moving Ray was the second option, but the same problems applied. His waking up while I was manhandling him somewhere would not be ideal. The issue of where to put him was reasonably straightforward; there were plenty of empty, lockable rooms to hold him within the bunker. I mean, I could obviously just hurl his ass off a cliff and into the sea, but this was Ray we were talking about. I wasn't going to even consider killing him until Freja and Mother had a good look at him and told me categorically that there was no way of reversing whatever the fuck had happened to him.

And no, I didn't even know where to start explaining that.

What the hell had happened to him? Was he always like this under the surface? And if so, why did he choose now to reveal himself and attack? He was clearly intent on killing me, and there had been plenty of times we had been alone, especially exploring the tunnels recently, so why not do it then? And if he wasn't always like this, and, as I suspected, he had been possessed by something, then where the fuck did it come from? Why possess Ray? And, again, why now? And don't get me started on the whole time thing. That was the stuff that mental breakdowns were made of.

Divine powers were running rampant on this island; it was best for my own sanity to just not question it.

With a heavy sigh, a decision was made. The first and most obvious thing to do was to turn Ray around. His devastatingly dangerous swing suddenly being redirected into thin air would not only render it useless but could buy me a few much-needed moments of confusion as he tried to get his bearings. What struck me as odd was how remarkably light Ray was. As I have said, Ray was not a small guy, and although I was pretty strong, I was not strong enough to be able to manhandle Ray as if he were made out of cardboard, which I now found myself able to do.

The engineer in me had something of an aneurysm over this. Strength is essentially the body's ability to apply force, but that force has never in human history been able to be measured with time as a changeable factor. I suppose it made a certain amount of sense that I would be stronger; to me, I was just doing what I always did when lifting something, I applied force at a steady rate until the object - in this case, the creature formerly known as Ray - moved. But to everyone else's perception of time, all of that force, over all of that time, was condensed in a single cumulative moment. In other words, I had put ten minutes' worth of effort into a single blink of an eye.

There were physicists the world over who would spontaneously combust at the prospect of these revelations.

In a bit of scientific inquiry, but also because it would be useful - and funny - I found two large rocks, each about the size of my torso, and placed them directly in front of Ray's feet. Moving them, once again, proved to be child's play. If his forward momentum carried him as I thought it would do, these rocks would prove to be quite the trip hazard.

It would undoubtedly piss him off inordinately, but I would die laughing.

That brought us nicely to the next point. Or, more accurately, back to the original one; What to do about Ray. Moving him, apparently, would be easy, but that didn't negate the risk of him waking up before I had managed to secure him somewhere. What I needed was a way to effectively neutralize him. Cutting off those talons would be a good start, or even all of the fingers they were attached to. But this had some problems. First, it was still Ray, and I would rather not start cutting bits of him off. Secondly, he managed to grow those talons in only a few seconds; there was no way of knowing if he was able to regrow anything I cut off just as quickly. The next option, and, frankly, the only one left to me, was to tie the bastard up.

Over the course of our time on the island, we had found ourselves short of some pretty basic things. Nails, for example. Building things without nails was not impossible, far from it; just a lot more complicated and required much more intricate tools, which we didn't have. Luckily, the discovery of the bunker negated that need. Another such basic material was rope. Some had been found in the bunker, but it was so old that it had essentially been finely woven dust. Simply touching it had caused it to disintegrate.

Liz, however, had shown us how to make our own. It wasn't a hard process; it basically consisted of carefully peeling the fibrous bark off palm trees and other plants into strips and then plaiting and weaving them together. The more strands you wove in, the stronger it was. Although it was not exactly rocket science, it was time-consuming. Extremely time-consuming. Incidentally, it also gave you more splinters than any other task known to man.

We had coils of the stuff ready to be used back at the bunker; some of the girls - Katie and Robyn in particular - had claimed that the process was 'therapeutic.' I disagreed strenuously, but not enough to stop them from working. It would be infinitely quicker to run back there and get some, then run back, than it would be to sit here and make my own. But again, it would mean leaving the girls on their own with Ray. Knowing my luck, time would unfreeze when I was at the furthest point away. That whole return journey would probably take about thirty minutes at a full run. On the other hand, it would probably take me the better part of a day to make enough rope myself, but I would be on hand to... I don't know... Die heroically, probably, when time started to flow normally again.

With a heavy sigh, I accepted the inevitable. If Ray woke up before I was ready, I was fucked. We all were. I needed to get him somewhere secure as soon as possible, and tying him up after time unfroze seemed to be a very quick way to get decapitated. I needed that rope sooner rather than later. With a glance back at the girls, the terrified expressions still etched onto their beautiful faces, I turned back toward the waterfall and the path toward the bunker.

It's amazing how our eyes work. A simple glance downward to confirm my footing was all it took. The sand and small pebbles - smoothed by years of water erosion - made a uniform pattern of shapes and colors on the bed of the lake. Usually obstructed by the rippling water and glistening light reflected off it, I had never really paid much attention to it, but that simple glance noticed something foreign on the lake floor. My eye spotted the six-inch long silver cylinder and passed the information onto my brain, which - despite all the other vastly more important things bouncing around it - immediately recognized that, whatever it was, didn't belong there and decided I should pick it up.

I had barely lifted it out of the water, barely had time to straighten myself up, barely had a chance to even take a proper look at the intricately carved and engraved piece of six-inch and broom-handle thick metal when I seemed to fall prey to the same sudden freezing of time that had ensnared the rest of the group. Unlike them, however, I still seemed to be aware and still able to move my eyes.

Perfect! Now, what do I do?

My eyes flicked around frantically, not expecting to find anything that would come to my aid, but trying anyway. I could feel my heart start to beat a little faster, and I could feel the sweat beading on my brow. I clearly wasn't frozen as the others had been, but I certainly couldn't move a single part of my body.

My thoughts were interrupted by a sudden crack of thunder from overhead. My eyes shot skyward and frowned - or they would have if I was capable of moving my eyebrows. Thunder was not a particularly obscure natural occurrence, but it was vastly more rare on a bright, gloriously clear and cloudless, sunshiny day. A bolt of lightning, pale yellow and brilliant, seemed to come out of nowhere and smash into the bank on the lakeshore in front of me, burning an elaborate and totally indecipherable runic pattern into the grass.

And then he was there.

As if melting into existence through the faded swirls of smoke coming from the charred grass, he faded into being, tall, broad, and with an unmistakable air of supremacy that I had only felt in the presence of Freja.

To describe him, I am going to have to do something I never thought I would ever need to do; I'm going to use a Disney reference.

For those of you who have seen it, cast your minds back to the original animated tale of The Little Mermaid and think of the protagonist's royal father, King Triton. Standing at almost seven feet, the man in front of me made me think of this fictional character immediately. Clearly obscenely old, ancient even, his flowing wavy, snow-white hair fell to his shoulders and framed a set of piercing blue eyes. A beard of the same color cascaded onto a bare chest that was, in a word, massive. Those were pectoral muscles that looked like they could stop a freight train with little more than an indifferent gesture. And just like the Disney character, he carried an eight-foot long, three-pronged, glinting gold trident spear in his left hand.

Ignoring the others and casting little more than a contemptuous glance at Ray - who I now worriedly realized was facing me again - his eyes bore into me with a scrutiny the likes of which I will never be able to describe.

"So," he murmured, his voice carried like a sonic boom, "you are the one." He took a few steps forward; his impossibly long and powerful-looking legs carried him across the distance between us in only a few purposeful strides.

Seriously, whoever this guy was, he could have every major NFL franchise offering him the kidneys of the CEO's grandmother to sign with them. He had missed his calling as a linebacker... or, you know, a small hill.

With my eyes craning upwards as far as they were able to look at him, he reached his free hand around my hand and clamped a grip onto the back of my neck. His fingers ran through my hair until he found what he was looking for.

"Interesting," he mused before tapping it.

A blinding jolt of pain ripped through my skull, and amazingly, a small grunt of agony rippled through my chest. I should have been confused. I should have wondered if it was possible for a man - who was clearly divine in nature - to shatter my skull with a drum of his fingers, but instead, I seemed to instinctively understand where this pain was coming from. My mind flashed back to the night of the crash.

The howling of the wind as the cabin depressurized.

The look on Hayley's face as she was sucked towards the cavernous hole in the fuselage.

The iron-willed, inhuman grip I maintained on her wrist as the winds raced past me.

And the sickening crunch, the jolt of pain, the lurch of my stomach, and the warm wetness on my neck as something smashed into the back of my head.

The injury that should have killed me, or at least critically injured me, had been forgotten as instantly as it had been inflicted, overwhelmed, and brushed aside by my stubborn resolution to not let go of Hayley. What was more, I seemed to understand that this had been done not by the intervention of Gods whose existence was still unknown to me but by me.

The man took a step back and eyed me curiously. "You know what to do. Show me you are worthy!"

Do I? Can I get a fucking hint? No? Great... thanks!

The pain was quickly becoming unbearable. Behind the searing throb of my skull laid the aching undercurrent of pain from my leg, the cut I had found in the life raft that I hadn't given a second thought to since.

I closed my eyes.

Okay, I didn't close my eyes; I still couldn't move, but my sight lost focus in much the same way they would have if my eyes were closed. Instead, I turned my attention inward, concentrating intently on the sight of pain blazing beneath my hair.

I would love to tell you about the inner struggle where I forced my body and my subconscious to submit to the awe-inspiring, pure power of my will. I'm sure it would be very dramatic to describe how I fought valiantly against the walls inside my mind and battered them down, all while coming to some profound realization about my own nature, perhaps even the nature of all human consciousness.

But I would be lying.

I focused inwards in much the same way as I would if I had a headache - which is exactly what I did have - and I could just... see everything.

The spider's web of cracked bones at the back of my skull was as plain as day to me. I can't explain how I could see it; I just could. It was like I could see all of me, like looking at a ghostly representation of myself, within myself, and around that spectral image, I could see the parts of me that I didn't recognize. From my cock's ability to regain its full strength in a fraction of the time it used to take and the increased potency and refill rate of my balls, to the deep but relatively harmless slice along the length of my calf.

It was this wound that I found myself concentrating on. In comparison to the injury to the back of my head, it was nothing. And because it was nothing, I was ignoring the pain, not in a comparative sort of way where the head injury overrode the pain from my leg, but it was more like it wasn't important, so I was dismissing it entirely. And because I dismissed it, it stopped hurting completely. Amy was the medical professional of our group, and compared to her, my anatomical understanding was pretty limited, but even I knew that this was not how pain worked.

My focus moved upwards to the shattered back of my skull. As soon as I found it, a lance of searing pain immediately smashed through me. It felt like every nerve in my body spontaneously burst into flame. My legs would have buckled beneath me if it wasn't for the frozen time holding me up, my stomach turned, and another simmering whimper of agony fell from my lips. I instinctively 'looked' away.

And the pain subsided.

I frowned, my internal vision randomly fixed onto my belly button.

"Out of sight, out of mind" was not a concept that usually fits well into the subject of pain management; either something hurt or it didn't. Yes, of course, there were varying degrees of pain, but ignoring it didn't work in the same way as ignoring Jehovah's Witnesses. Pretending it wasn't there didn't make it go away.... And yet...

My eyes, my real eyes, flicked up again. The towering hulk of a man was leaning on his trident spear and was watching me with an air of intense curiosity. There was something about the glint in his eyes and the slightest curl of his lips that just pissed me off. It was like this whole thing was a game to him. My pain, whatever-the-fuck had happened to Ray, the danger we were all in because of it, it was all happening for this smug asshole's amusement.

In a flashed burst of emotion that sat somewhere on the scale between anger, frustration, and impotence, I did it. If he was so entertained by the pain I was suffering and ignoring that pain made it go away, then I would simply refuse to acknowledge it was there at all!

And just like that, it wasn't.

It wasn't that I healed myself; there was no knitting together of shattered bone and torn skin. There was no easing of nerves or repairing severed blood vessels. It was as if the injuries themselves had never happened. They were just gone. And while I was at it, I didn't particularly want to remain in some sort of suspended animation for the amusement of buff Santa, either!

I stumbled forward with a yelp.

The shit-eating grin on Hulk Santa's face grew a little wider. "So the rumors are true."

I flashed a quick look around to make sure that the others were still frozen, or specifically, to make sure that Ray was still frozen, before I turned my attention back to the man with the glorified pitchfork. "What? Who are you?"

He waved the question away dismissively as his eyes rested on the small metallic tube in my hand. "Do you know what that is?"

I dropped my gaze to the engraved hunk of metal in my hand. "Err, I have no idea."

"You are about to. Defend yourself!"

There was a roar to my right as the pause was removed from reality. My head shot around in time to see Ray launching himself forward, a brief look of confusion on his face at the sudden rearrangement of his targets, and then a yelp as he tripped over the rocks in front of him and toppled face-first into the water.

I think the tension of the moment got to me because I snorted out a laugh.

That alone was enough to silence the terrified screams of the girls, but the rumbling growl that bled from the lips of the soaked Ray as he pulled himself out of the water and back to his feet wiped the chuckle from my face. "Ah, fuck!"

A lot of things seemed to happen at once.

First of all, the screams started again. But more relevant to the situation at hand was the fact that the thing in my hand started to grow. In only a few seconds, the six-inch-long cylinder of engraved silver stretched out to a five-foot pole staff that looked like something the Monopoly man would use instead of a broom handle. Knowledge, or perhaps instinct was a better term for it, seemed to pour out of it. It was like it was teaching me how to use it in real-time.

I was moving before I could consciously process the thoughts that dictated it.

Ray's arm was already mid-swing as he threw himself ragefully toward me again; those deadly-looking talons were streaking through the air at a horrifying speed, once again on a collision course with my head. But this time, instead of pondering what my head would look like if it was scythed into slices, I was thinking about how woefully haphazard the swing was and how utterly off-balance it left him.

The staff was spinning in my hands as I took a measured step to the left, bringing one end of my weapon down in a powerful, fluid motion that smashed into the back of Ray's wrist with a sickening crunch. The howl that left his lips was a mix of furious anger and sudden agony as the momentum of his swing, disrupted and exaggerated by my strike, sent him sprawling past me.

He turned back to face me. That growling snarl of pure contempt flowed over his bleeding lips as he regarded me properly, no longer just a target, no longer prey, but this time, as a threat. His eyes flicked down to the silver staff in my hand before back to my face.

He started circling. Although it was clear that he had no interest in the women at all, at least not at that moment, I still was careful to keep myself between him and them. Hulk Santa on the lake shore, despite clearly being able to intervene, seemed perfectly happy to lean on his spear and watch. More than that, none of the others, Ray included, seemed to have noticed him at all.

With each step, Ray inched a little closer; his bloodshot, demonic-looking eyes had not left mine for an instant. To make matters just that little more freaky, I realized that the son-of-a-bitch didn't seem to ever blink. How the fuck do you stare down someone who doesn't blink?!? He was making my eyes water in sympathy for his.

The subject was rendered moot when he charged at me again, though. There must have been a good fifteen feet between us when the water around his legs exploded into a deluge of spray as those powerful legs catapulted him toward me. His swing was a lot more measured this time, but he still seemed intent on cleaving through my head. If he had lunged toward my chest, I may have been in more trouble. Instead, I ducked and spun as I moved under the swing, the staff whirling through the air before the butt was swung with devastating force into his ribs.

There was a huff of breath as Ray buckled, his entire body folding over itself as his upper and lower halves moved forward under the momentum of his stride and his swing while the middle was smashed backward with the force of the staff's blow. Time seemed to slow down as I kept spinning, the staff dancing and playing through the light and the flying droplets of water as it twirled through the air, and the stock of the weapon cracked, with equally catastrophic force, under the chin of my attacker.

To me, the force I applied seemed moderate at best. It was just the culmination of a series of movements designed to incapacitate a threat; there had been no particularly serious effort put into the power of the strike. Ray, however, seemed to disagree.

Time was still moving at its snail's pace as his body sailed through the air, a good three feet clear of the surface of the lake. His body seemed to blur as it flew like it was vibrating too fast for the human eye to see, like the blur of a hummingbird's wings, before a deathly grey shadow seemed to tear itself from my friend's chest just before it was swallowed by the water as Ray became reacquainted with gravity.

The shadow faded into nothingness as it melted into the sky.

Hulk Santa frowned as he watched it too.

The girl's screams changed to gasps of amazement as their eyes fell on me.

Ray bubbled.

And the staff shrank back down to its original size in my hand.