Jace - Gaslights his body into rejecting Phyrexian Oil

A distant recollection burns to the surface, and he hears it there next to him on the beach. "The brain is the seat of the body, and the body heals or withers at the brain's lead."

It is an old memory, a complicated one, distant and echoed through decades and layers of forgetfulness, but its wisdom provides the answer. He needs to make himself sick, he needs to force his body to fight what his mind cannot.

Jace stands, plants his feet in the flour-soft sand of the beach. He tightens his core, exhales, and feels his eyes ignite as he holds out his hands to the horizon in telepathic command.

THE OIL IN YOUR VEINS IS A VIRUS.

Nothing happens immediately, but he sees out on the edge of the horizon that the sky begins to deepen and buckle, turbulent and periwinkle.

YOU ARE FEVERISH. YOU ARE DEADLY ILL.

Lightning crackles through the sky, and Jace feels himself pulled forward, his toes scraping the sand as he's lifted and pulled. He doubles down, focusing the entirety of his will on his task. If he is to survive, he must force his body to fight off the virus of phyresis. He urges it to allow him back inside—

YOU ARE BREATHING, AND YOU ARE ALIVE.

YOU ARE FIGHTING AN INFECTION AND WINNING.

Jace blinks, a flicker of consciousness to whatever his body is doing on the outside—

—his ears aren't quite ringing, but buzzing with static—

—his body is under a turbulent sky, packed tight in a crowd, his ears are ringing, and he's pressed against a long line of his Phyrexian compatriots.

***

When Jace returns to consciousness, he arrives with a collision, gasping back to wakefulness, his body and mind united again, lying on his back in a ravine. There are other bodies, mostly Phyrexian, on all sides. The rain has soaked through to his skin. His chest burns from the residual Halo, his arm puckered with open gashes from the tubes he pulled, but mostly what Jace feels is fever. Hot vertigo and hazy hallucinations play at his vision, his muscles shiver with chills, and his brow sweat mingles with rain. He has pushed his power to new limits, and he is so proud, weak, and powerful at once.

But then he remembers the lines of victims dying on the ground. How that was his fault. How easy it was to seize, to demolish, to murder. It was easy because you've killed Vryn soldiers before. Alhammarret would be proud. The voice he hears is his own, the delusion of sickness, and Jace shivers to hear its judgment: did you forget who you are? Whatever of him that wasn't burning with fever dropped to the ground. Jace had put on the illusion of a savior so well, convinced his friends he could carry the sylex, that they could save the Multiverse, a pleasant fantasy that stood in stark contrast to the score of soldiers he was able to seize with ease into damage and death. Yes. He had forgotten.

Fever comes as a distinct and new wave, and Jace exhales away his own feverish voice in his mind. He is freezing cold, clammy with sweat, and in the delusion of self-induced encephalitis, he stands to his feet, uncertain where to go next. He feels his body fight back, the oil calling to him again, but not this time—Jace digs his heels into the oil-soaked earth and broadcasts to his own mind an assertion: I AM IN CONTROL.

He blinks, breathes. He is in control. He is. And as Jace revels in his reclaimed agency, he grasps one of the cables in his arm and rips it out. He screams, blood mixed with oil pours from the wound, and he can feel his bare skin hot with fever.

The pull of the oil is weakening, but so is his heart, his lungs; the wound in Jace's chest now leaks blood rather than oil.

***

Outlaws of Thunder Junction | Epilogue 1: Bring the End, Part 1