You’re cer­tainly in a pickle.

You can’t see a thing. You can’t move an inch.

You can, in fact, hear.

You can hear quite a bit. You can hear the blood rush­ing through your head; you can hear your heart pound­ing. You can hear your body as it tries its hard­est to resist.

But you can’t hear any­thing else.

The world is gone.

You are helpless.

Yet you still have your mind.

She can’t con­trol what you think.

She only con­trols the inky ten­drils of pure shadow that enve­lope you; that sep­a­rate you and the out­side world; that hold you captive.

The shadow that can absorb all your power – which is funny, see­ing as you thought you had a lot.

Really, you didn’t get the feel­ing of power from the girl at all. She felt like she barely had any.

And these shadows…

They don’t feel like you’d expect. They don’t feel entirely for­eign. They don’t even feel remotely foreign.

They feel familiar.

They feel like home.

They feel like you.

And then it clicks.

You real­ize: this shadow which sur­rounds you; this dark­ness that entraps you; it’s not hers. It’s yours. It’s your own thoughts.

She’s not con­trol­ling your mind.

You are.

All she had to do was nudge it.

Your own thoughts, made solid, sur­round and trap you.

You don’t know how to fight it.

You have to think some other way. You have to break your­self from the mind­set you have long ago trapped your­self in…

But you can’t.

So instead, you do what you always do.

Per­haps it won’t work for­ever. But it will work for now.

You don’t know what to do with the thoughts, so you push them away. It’s a tried and true method.

Ouch!

You fall to the ground. Sound deaf­ens you; light blinds you; you stumble…

You close your eyes, and con­cen­trate. The world rights itself, you stand–

You are face-to-face, eye-to-eye, with the girl – that Phoenix of Vul­ner­a­bil­ity; of Helplessness.

You are not help­less against your own thoughts.

Merely mostly helpless.

She was able to nudge them into phys­i­cal form, but you were able to change them.

She smiles.

You don’t know why she does.

You just take her magic.

It’s not like last time. You don’t have that whis­per­ing voice with its words of impulse.

You don’t even have whis­pers of help­less­ness. No whis­pers telling you how there’s no solu­tion to your prob­lem; that every­thing is ruined, and there’s noth­ing to be done.

Instead, you hear whis­pers much more frightening.

They tell you that it’s not that there’s no solu­tion to be found…

It’s that you’re try­ing to solve the wrong problem.

Those shad­ows that bound you had always bound you; you just didn’t know they were there.

Even though they’re phys­i­cal forms have once more dis­ap­peared… Even though you are now phys­i­cally free…

You know…

The voices whisper…

You’re still every bit as trapped.