His skin had swollen and turned white from soaking in the river. Clear water from the Alps flowed over his rotting eyes, washing away the maggots writhing across his eyeballs. His limbs drifted apart in the current as fish tore at the soft, decaying flesh. He lay on his back atop the corpses, dark green algae clinging to his skin with the flow. His heavy clothes kept dragging him down, but the densely packed, bloated, pallid bodies on the river's surface held him up, keeping him from sinking into the pitch-black riverbed where the corpses blocked out the sun.
"Your psionic power is strong enough to alter genomes. That means you have no choice. You cannot even kill yourself, my dear child. You can only be forced to face all the filth in this world." The Sorcerer Supreme stood upon the water, ripples spreading outward from beneath her plain Kamar-Taj boots. "If you cannot remember, I will remind you. This is the Sava River, and these corpses bear witness to Ustasha atrocities. You experienced all of it firsthand, even if it was merely a dream formed collectively by all survivors and victims. This is the filth within humanity's collective unconscious. The mud at the bottom of the river is the physical manifestation of that concept. But you have no choice. This is why you were born, isn't it?"
To fight that which could not be fought.
"In all your simulations and projections, you never left a place for yourself."
The Sorcerer Supreme frowned toward the riverbank.
The corpses there were piled into mountains. The storm thundered in his ears, and tiny psionic bolts flickered across the river. Every corpse by the bank bore at least several bullet holes or cutting wounds. They were wounds made by a small knife consisting