The morning peace within the soot stained walls of the broken horn was not awakened by the cheerful crowing of a rooster, but was instead torn apart by a chilling and unnatural silence that weighed heavier than any physical sound, a silence that felt like a burial shroud draped over the entire tavern. Juro entered the childrens quarters with a tray of steaming herbal tea held in his calloused and scarred hands, but the liquid grew stone cold and bitter before he could even reach the center of the room. All he found was a window standing wide open to the toxic smog, an icy and mocking draft making the curtains flutter like tattered shrouds in a graveyard, whispering of a departure that should never have happened. There was no silarias, no nyx, and even the constant low frequency growl of toji and the comforting solar warmth of the golden boar had vanished into the ether, leaving behind only the cold scent of ozone and reckless ambition.
On the creaking floorboards lay nyxs ancient tome, a great book of shadows open to a chapter that should never have been touched by the innocent eyes of children, titled spatial overlap and the translocation of the soul. The yellowed pages were frantic with nyxs refined but possessed handwriting, ink stains marking the most dangerous and unstable formulas like black weeping scars on the parchment, proof of a mind that had traded caution for curiosity. Those little idiots, juro growled, his smoke aura instinctively expanding until it filled the room with a suffocating charcoal gray mist that mirrored his rising panic, a fog of dread that clawed at the walls. They have gone to the forge, they have jumped headfirst into the abyss without having the slightest clue how deep the fall really is, or what kind of monsters are waiting at the bottom.
Juro snapped open the mentors internal frequency, his voice sounding like grinding gravel and broken glass through the comms, vibrating with a raw edge of desperation. Beat, they are gone, they are heading for the citadel, the only place that arrogant brat nyx would search for the treasure of the forge, she forced a breach in the world, she is tearing the map apart. Before he could even finish the sentence, he felt a sharp and cutting cold bloom behind him, the temperature in the room plummeting below freezing in a fraction of a second until frost began to crawl across the floorboards. Vespera stood in the doorway, her eyes usually so cool and calculating, now glowing with a motherly and predatory rage that made the very foundations of the tavern groan in protest. Her silver needles hovered around her in a lethal vibrating swarm like a cloud of metallic hornets, each one humming with a killing intent that could pierce armor.
Juro, direction and distance now, she commanded, her voice vibrating with a frequency that threatened to shatter the windows and boil the blood in his veins. Juro sputtered, trying to warn her that the forge was a graveyard of gods, but vespera interrupted him with an icy and final snap that echoed like a whip. Not my child, where is the border before i have to rip the memory directly from your brain and leave you a hollow shell? Juro swallowed his protests and pointed a trembling finger directly south, toward the heart of the smog where the sky was thickest with ash. Four arrow shots away, southward, they are leaving a trail of anima as thick and sweet as syrup, a beacon of light in this godforsaken dark.
Vespera did not wait for another word, she began to spin silver threads in a complex and geometric pattern that even the veteran beat had never witnessed before, a tapestry of pure kinetic potential. Nice that we can still teach each other things, beat, she whispered coolly as she shot the threads into the distance, anchoring them to the jagged ruins of the ward with the precision of a master weaver. Using the enormous tension and her own weighted anima, she launched herself forward, slicing through the air like a silver projectile while her threads functioned as giant invisible catapults, snapping her through space with a violent velocity. Her speed defied all human logic, a blur of steel and fury that left a shimmering wake in the smog.
Juro was not to be outdone, his face turning a bright and dangerous red from the sheer effort of his transformation, his lungs pulling in the toxic air to fuel the fire within. Poooffff, smoke exploded from his every pore, wrapping around his legs like screaming charcoal turbo engines, propelling him forward with a force that cracked the cobblestones beneath him. With a raw and desperate laugh, he kept pace with vespera, his trail of soot turning the sky black behind them like a rolling storm cloud. No one leaves the smoke behind! Beat watched them fade into the horizon and calmly counted on his fingers, his eyes widening as the plasma of his mohawk flickered erratically with the rhythm of his racing heart. 1 minus 2 is 1 plus 2 is 3, he muttered before his eyes went wide with a manic electric light. Eureka, 3 equals anarchy! Beat reached his final form, applying his sound as a concentrated sonic spear for his legs, focusing every decibel of his power into a single point of propulsion. The sound barrier was broken with a thunderous bang that shattered every window in the ward, and with his buffed sonic sled technique, he flew forward, literally pulled by the pure and terrifying vacuum of the spear he had created for himself, a streak of neon lightning against the gray.
Meanwhile, at the ominous and towering outer walls of the obsidian forge, the children were at the absolute end of their physical strength, their breaths coming in ragged shallow gasps. Silarias whimpered softly, his voice trembling with an exhaustion that reached his very soul. I cannot go on, nyx, my feet are burning and these gloves feel like they are made of lead, they are dragging me into the dirt. Nyx, her face tight with a mask of concentration and mounting irritation, snapped at him without looking back, her eyes fixed on the obsidian barrier. I read this, silarias, so what does it matter! It cannot get any worse than your whining, we do this now, or we die here! Nyx charged her small hands with a sinister and silvery moon energy that made the surrounding shadows shiver in fear, recalling the forbidden formulas for splitting dimensions that she had memorized from the stolen tome. She placed her trembling palms against the massive cold wall of the forge and began to pull, physically tearing a rift in reality itself with a strength that should not belong to a child. The sound was like the agonizing tearing of silk mixed with the shattering of a million glass mirrors, a screech of reality being violated. If i am right, nyx gasped, her breath coming in ragged bursts as her nose began to bleed from the strain, this rift will take us directly to the hidden treasure vault, where the secrets of the gods are kept.
The rift lit up with a toxic and blinding purple glare, a light that seemed to eat the surrounding color, and sucked them in with a brute and uncaring force that felt like being crushed by a falling mountain. But the forge was no ordinary place, it was a sentient monument of ancient power, and it reacted violently to the incomplete and unstable magic of a child. Reality could not hold the bridge and split instead into two horrific extremes, shattering the connection between the two friends. Silarias was spat out into a landscape of eternal fire and black suffocating ash known as the hell verse, a place where gravity tried to crush his small body against the scorched earth while the shadows of the forge watched him like hungry unseen prey, waiting for him to break.
Nyx landed in a place that looked almost the same as the forge, but felt fundamentally different, for everything was wrapped in a deathly and absolute silence that rang in her ears like a scream. The air was as thick as syrup and tasted of nothing at all, a timeless vacuum where every thought left a haunting distorted echo in the white void. What they did not know was the cruel and ancient law of these dimensions, for time flowed here like a racing unstoppable river of mercury while the outside world stood perfectly still. As they wandered their respective prisons, it felt to silarias and nyx as if agonizing years were passing, fighting for their lives every single second of every single day. In the real world, they would only be missing for two years, but the dimensional friction was a thief of youth. By the time they emerged, they would no longer be the children of 12 they once were, but the trained hardened and battle scarred survivors of 15 years old, trapped in a hell of their own accidental and desperate creation.
The rift spat silarias out into a world where the very air was thick with the stench of sulfur and the taste of burnt blood, landing him in the hell verse, a dimension where the sun never dared to rise. The only light came from the slow and agonizing streams of liquid iron running through the cracked skeletal landscape like glowing molten veins. He stood in the middle of a settlement of exhausted and broken beings called obsidian reach, inhabitants who were hell spawns, their bodies scarred by generations of slavery to the forge.
When silarias stood up, his small frame shaking, a deep and guttural growl sounded from the crowd, a sound of recognition. The young nobody understood them immediately, not with his ears, but with the ancient and dormant blood of the guardian flowing through his veins, singing a song of war. The soul bound elder, a being with horns of petrified soot and eyes that had seen too much death, shuffled slowly toward him and pointed a trembling claw at the golden gauntlets that now pulsed with a dark inner light. Stop, do not look at his weakness, look at his arms, the elder whispered to the murmuring crowd. That symbol, that engraving under the gold, it is the seal of the guardian. The man who opened the gate to carry the flame out wore the same sign on his chest when he fell, and now the flame has returned. Silarias felt an icy shiver as baby flashbacks sliced through his mind like razors, the smell of burning flesh, the rhythmic sound of marching metal boots, and the memory of a man holding him tightly as he ran through a wall of fire to bring him to safety.
The ground thudded rhythmically, a tremor that rattled silarias teeth, as a massive figure appeared, sitting on a throne of bones carried by toiling slaves. This was the tribe master, a tyrant whose aura was so heavy that the ash on the ground began to swirl into a vortex in his presence. He looked at silarias with a gaze of pure sadistic amusement, a predator watching a wounded bird. A little nobody with the seal of a traitor? In this world, i dictate who breathes and who burns, and you, little spark, look ready to be extinguished. Silarias tried to call upon the solar energy of the twins, but the sun could not reach him here, the connection severed by the dimensional walls of the pit. The tribe master grabbed him by the throat, lifting his 12 year old body into the sulfurous air with one hand. No sun here, little one, only the pressure of the pit and the heat of the forge. But in that pit, among the starving beasts and the broken slaves, silarias did not fight with the violence of a boy, he began to whisper in the ancient forbidden language of hell. The beasts froze, their hunger replaced by a primal terror, and the golden glow of his anima began to mutate, turning pitch black at the edges as it fed on the hatred and despair of the environment. He was no longer a sun, he was an eclipse in the making, a dark light that would soon consume his captors.
In a world of eternal cold moonlight and floating temples of liquid crystal, nyx landed, but this was no homecoming to a paradise. The gods here, radiant beings of pure and emotionless light, looked down on her with absolute loathing, their faces like marble masks. Because she was the daughter of the moon queen who had grown up among the filth of the ward, they treated her like an impure bastard child, a stain on their perfect tapestry. They locked her in a tower of liquid crystal to reset her, intending to erase her memories, her friendships, and her humanity so she could become a perfect mindless doll for their divine will.
Toji growled in the corner, his three heads baring their teeth in a desperate display of protection, but his powers were suppressed by the sacred suffocating laws of the temple. From the shadow of the tower, however, stepped a being that did not belong to the light, a black cat as large as a panther with eyes in which the entire cosmos seemed to swirl and expand. With one silent tap of its paw, the cat shattered the magical seal of the tower like it was cheap glass. Do not cry little architect, the cat spoke with a voice that sounded like falling stardust and ancient secrets. Light reveals only what the gods want you to see, i am here to teach you what they have forgotten in their arrogance, that the moon only truly shines in the darkness. The cat did not free her to escape, but to teach her the hard and wise lessons of the hidden side of her heritage. You are no bastard, nyx, you are the bridge, and the bridge must be stronger than the banks it connects. Your training begins now, in the shadow of the divine light, until you can build a path out of this heaven.
Back at the rift in the crumbling wall of the forge, juro visualized the lingering smoke particles, seeing the exact flawed formula nyx had used in the traces she left behind. His face turned a ghostly white, a color he had never worn in all his years of underworld combat, as the realization of their fate hit him like a physical blow. The book, vespera, look at the notes on page 402, he managed to choke out, his voice trembling. Vespera snatched the book away, her eyes scanning the complex frantic text with a desperate speed. Dimensional portals, but the coordinates do not match physical space! They are not on the map anymore! Juro nodded slowly, his gaze fixed on the spot where the children had vanished into the air. That is because they did not go to places, ve, but to origins. One is the source of all conflict, the hell verse, and the other the source of all order, the divine plain. They are trapped in the absolute extremes of existence, caught between the hammer and the anvil. They realized with a soul crushing shock that the children were now in the most dangerous places in the known cosmos, and every second the mentors hesitated was a month of suffering and survival for silarias and nyx. Time had become their greatest enemy, a racing current they cannot stop, and the war for the souls of their children had only just begun.
