Miseria emerged into reality, her form phasing from Klaus's Soul Sea like mist peeling off still water. Her arrival was silent, ethereal—yet the weight of her presence pressed softly on the stale air around them. Her gaze swept over the strange, broken fragment of island they'd been marooned on. She hovered behind Klaus, watching her master and companions, a flicker of perplexity in her usually serene gaze.
Why, in all realms of logic and madness, were they still here?
Gliding silently, she floated behind Klaus, wrapping her arms around him like an affectionate ghost. She leaned close, voice soft and sweet as poisoned wine.
"My lord… has the plan evolved into living here? Because it's been a week since we arrived, and I must say… the scenery is dreadful."
Klaus sighed from one of his many mouths, then replied through another—because of course, a single mouth was never enough for someone like him.
"We're working on that," he said flatly. "The goal is to reach the Ebony Tower. It's the only place nearby with any semblance of safety. But Hemera, despite her stamina, can only fly for a full day before exhaustion takes its toll. and I can't switch places with her so she can rest in my Soul Sea. So—"
"We fall back to the Tear," Lich finished for him, nodding in grim agreement.
Hemera offered a solemn nod of her own, but Miseria only frowned deeper, her expression beneath the veil one of mounting disbelief.
"But… can't you just turn into a human?"
Klaus blinked.
Lich blinked.
Then they stared at her in dead silence.
"…What?"
"I mean," she said with a shrug, "you were human. Sure, now you look like a rotting meatball with too many teeth, but Faceless lets you reshape your body, right? Can't you just shift back?"
Both Klaus and Lich simultaneously facepalmed with the kind of synchronized shame that only the truly brilliant can share when reminded how idiotic they've been. Klaus groaned and cast an accusatory glance at Lich.
"Aren't you the self-proclaimed Wise Seeker of Truth, knower of a thousand secrets, master of divine knowledge, yadda yadda?"
Lich's skeletal eye sockets flared with ghostly fire. He cracked his bony fingers and raised one admonishing finger like a scolding tutor.
"Aren't you the self proclaimed mentor of deceit? The man who tricked the world and claims to never forget anything?"
They stared at each other like squabbling scholars, puffed up with ancient pride and freshly bruised egos. Then slowly turned their gazes to the ground, deeply ashamed.
Hemera, meanwhile, tilted her head in complete confusion, utterly lost in the exchange.
Miseria sighed. Her face was hidden behind her veil, but one didn't need to see her features to sense the exasperation radiating from her. watching them with the same expression one reserves for two children who've just discovered fire is hot.
"…I don't even know what to say," she muttered. "As you like to say, my lord… what level of idiots are you two?"
Klaus looked away, visibly embarrassed. Then, as if to save face, all twenty of his mouths let out a chorus of laughter that echoed off the warped stone like a demonic opera. Even Lich cracked a dry chuckle, the sound like wind through hollow ribs.
But then it hit him.
Wait a moment…
He can't turn into monsters. Which meant—he couldn't turn into a human, either.
Not anymore.
Not unless he learned how.
Back when he was human, reshaping his appearance had been simple. he could bend it with terrifying ease—reshaping bones, flesh, organs, anything. The human anatomy was familiar. Flexible. Moldable. Like wet clay. bend a rib here, shift a jawline there, tweak the nose a little. Easy. But now? Now he was something... else. Something stitched together by nightmare logic, with a body that had more in common with a Lovecraftian crab than a man.
he was a monster. A Nightmare Creature. His body obeyed different rules—alien rules. Anatomy, mass, structure… nothing matched. No symmetry, no cohesion. His current vessel wasn't even remotely compatible with human biology.
Changing into a human from this wasn't like rearranging furniture.
It was like trying to turn a haunted cathedral into a paper boat.
Still, Klaus was nothing if not determined.
"Alright, you freeloaders," he declared, his many mouths grinning with mad determination. "Time to do science."
And with that, he began the painstaking process of trying to force his body into a human form.
weaving intent into form, drawing on every drop of knowledge he had about the human body. Muscles, bones, nerves—he remembered them. He had dissected thousands of nightmares. Surely he could reverse-engineer a man.
It did not go well.
One attempt left him looking like a melted mannequin. Another resulted in a very convincing sack of flesh with a mouth on its stomach. Hemera had to turn away during one try because she swore he was becoming worse. Lich helpfully pointed out that Klaus now resembled a failed taxidermy project. Miseria suggested he stop before the Tear devoured them all out of pity.
He collapsed like a sack of bad ideas, hissing in pain.
No matter what he did, his form refused to align with a human template. The gap between nightmare and man was too wide. Too alien. This vessel—this cursed, mutated shell—was never meant to become anything else.
The first week ended in failure. No matter how hard he tried, Klaus could not recreate a human form.
No human form. No brilliant transformation. Just a very tired phoenix, a very disappointed ghost, a very sarcastic skeleton, and one formerly-human mastermind reduced to... Whatever he was now.
At least he tried.
But he would figure it out.
Eventually.
Probably.
Maybe.
…Hopefully before the Tear got bored and ate them all.
Week Two.
Not much had changed—except for one rather pressing detail: Klaus had maybe a day or two left before this fragment of land was swallowed by the Tear. Devoured completely, along with whatever poor souls were still clinging to it.
Still, Klaus remained calm.
Panic was a luxury for those who had time. Frustration? Even worse. It clouded thought and disrupted calculation. And if there was one thing Klaus knew, it was that clear thought in moments like this was more valuable than any power or weapon.
So, he continued his experiments. Continued to think.
What was a Faceless, truly?
A blank page. A foundationless template. It was the very concept of null—no fixed form, no identity, no self.
And yet, he was a Faceless.
No identity, yet infinite identities.
The paradox hit him with a sharp mental jolt:
If the Faceless is nothing, then by logical extension—it can become everything.
That idea kept circling in his mind.
After all, what is nothing, if not the beginning of everything?
The void, after all, was the cradle of the universe. Chaos became matter. Vacuum birthed stars. So if he, too, was 'nothing'—a shapeless being—then perhaps that was the point. If the blank page could host any story, then so could he.
He paused in thought.
So… If I'm everything, and everything can become me, then what does that make me?
His mouths let out a thoughtful, unified chuckle. The realization clicked like a lock turning open.
Everchanging.
"Maybe that's why I like that stupid card so much," he muttered aloud. "The Joker. Not part of the deck, but can become any part. Not bound to rules, yet able to imitate them all. beat them all. Chaos as potential."
Yes. That was the key.
He wasn't locked out of becoming human.
He was looking at it wrong.
The problem wasn't biological—it was conceptual.
Before the Spell twisted him, Klaus had been able to manipulate his body easily. He could restructure muscle fibers, realign his bones, shift skin, organs, even chemical balances—all with precise intent.
But now, in this monstrous vessel? His biology wasn't just different—it was an entirely different system of physics. Nightmare creatures didn't operate by human rules. Their anatomy wasn't just grotesque—it was metaphysically alien. It bent logic, violated symmetry, rejected biological norms.
Trying to shape this body into a human was like trying to sculpt water with a hammer.
He'd been trying to change the physical form first. But that was just the shell.
The real source of transformation was the spirit.
That was the nature of his Aspect—Change, entangled with Space and Time. A trinity of fundamental forces. All three were the scaffolding of existence.
What is Space?
Space is structure.
The framework. The lattice that holds form.
Imagine it as a perfect geometric grid, stretching in all directions—measurable, divisible, absolute. The place in which matter rests. The stage of existence. It doesn't dictate what happens—but it decides where it happens.
Time?
Time is direction.
a spiral hourglass, where grains fall in patterns—predictable yet unique. Time does not move—it simply is.
It's entropy. Decay. Sequence.
A cause stacked upon cause until the final effect.
Time holds structure's narrative.
And Change?
Change is intention. Force.
It is the scalpel that slices space, the hammer that reshapes time's rhythm. It is chaos given purpose, order undone and reformed. It is not what happens after time—it's what defies it.
Change is the hand that rewrites the equation.
Klaus's strength always lay in Space. Folding it. Bending it. Warping it. He could slip through cracks in dimensions like a snake through grass. After that came Change—unraveling identities, molding forms like clay.
But Time?
Time remained elusive.
He could describe it. Theoretically. Even simulate it in miniature.
But he couldn't feel it.
He couldn't will it.
His connection to Time was still too shallow. A pond's surface, undisturbed.
He would need to ascend. Grow stronger. Expand the structure of his soul.
But that was for later.
Now?
He had everything he needed.
His spirit—warped by the Spell—was now bound to the logic of nightmare beings. That's why he couldn't change shape easily. He was trying to write human equations on nightmare parchment.
But what if he could change that parchment first?
The body follows the spirit. The spirit determines the form.
Because that was the true mechanism. Not anatomy. Not mass. Not muscle.
Identity.
"Ha… ha… hahaha—"
All twenty mouths erupted into laughter, a cacophony of realization echoing through the broken sky.
Of course. Of course.
He'd forgotten the first lesson of his path. The most obvious one.
Don't think inside the box.
Hell—don't even acknowledge the box.
He had been trying to reshape his body—an anatomy that was never truly his. But the key wasn't the flesh. It never was.
He had to reshape the pattern of the soul.
Rewrite the spiritual equation at its core. Realign the metaphysical vectors that defined what he was, not what he looked like.
The Faceless was never about appearance.
It was about potential.
If he could define himself not as "Klaus the Nightmare," but as "Klaus the Blank," he could mold that void into the idea of a human. A persona, not a form. A narrative, not a skeleton.
Not change the clay—change the mold.
He lay on the broken earth, body twitching with latent mass, eyes burning in the dark.
And then, very carefully...
He began to reshape the silhouette of his soul.
Not into a monster.
Not into man.
Not into Icarus.
Not into Klaus.
But into a Oldest Dream.