When the Blaze came to an end, Ran and Haru both stood up and looked around.
They were surrounded by nothingness, with a few demon fortresses, their Blazeholdes blinking, standing strong like scattered stars in a night sky.
The palace was one of said fortresses. But of such edifices only less than a thousand could be counted in a city where millions of buildings had been sprawled over the landscape.
Ran avoided Soran Haru's eyes and started walking away, heading back towards the palace.
He sincerely hoped Mukoku was done with her dramatic tantrum. He needed a good sleep today.
He did get a good sleep, though it took a long time before he actually slept.
One memory had been burning in his mind.
"Who was your mother?"
He felt justified the way he'd reacted to that question. He didn't know much about his mother, he didn't want to know anything about her.
His father was the only parent he had as far as he was concerned. The only family that mattered to him.
As for how harsh he may have been to Haru—
"Haru, I'm only going to say this once. Never ask me about my mother again."
"Ran. I know it might not be something you are willing to talk about, but anything you could tell us about her could help…"
"I. Said. Never. Ask. Me. About. My mother again!!"
Hopefully Haru will get over it. They were both too matured in experience to give into childish grudges.
'And hopefully he won't speak of it again,' Ran thought finally before sleep claimed.
He woke up later to a huge surprise.
Time in Hell was a liar.
Without knowledge of the Blaze, Ran would have thought he'd been here mere weeks. But as he stared at his hands—calloused, bigger, and trembling—he knew better.
His fingernails had grown really long. His bones ached like old stone. His reflection in the smoke-mirrors of the corridor was no longer that of a preteen but of a young man, a teenager worn thin. Someone tired.
He felt older. Not just in his body—but in his memories. As if he'd lived years under sulfur skies, watching demon wars erupt and fade, polishing the bones of kings long dead, whispering to shadows that once had names.
And he remembered things he had never lived or experienced.
He could speak new tongues now—three of them. He knew the etiquette of seven Houses of Damnation. He could ride any beast of hell from demonbugs to ancient kaijus. He could prepare a glutton's feast for a noble that fed on guilt and serve it with a smile. These weren't things he was taught.
They were things he remembered doing.
The city of smoke and obsidian, the great City of Severance, had no sun. No days. No nights. Only flickering light from the bricks beneath his feet, glowing faintly from the infernal pressure boiling in the deep.
And yet—he felt the passage of time. Like something chewing on his marrow.
Today he woke up with white streaks in his hair. He wondered which of the Assarian essences running through him it had come from.
It certainly was not age as he was just sixteen—years—old now.
By method of elimination, it must be from whatever deity the ichor came from as neither Arkons nor the other abomination that gave his flesh of steel had hair.
He felt so much older, his shoulders felt heavy now when he walked, and his dreams from his last sleep were no dreams at all. They were windows. To cities he'd never visited. Conversations he hadn't had. To lives, maybe, that hadn't been his.
He stood on a high balcony of the palace now, watching the smoke below. The city writhed, as it always did—demons moved in knots and clusters, violence simmering in the bones of the air. But something had changed.
Not just in the city.
In him.
He no longer feared the Queen's rage like he once did. He could anticipate it now. Feel the pulses in the ground a moment before she screamed. Could tell, by the taste in the air, whether a Lagarakei was passing close beneath the crust.
He was adapting. Or maybe he was becoming something else.
Something not quite mortal anymore.
A voice beside him, one of the senior attendants and servants, spoke in a voice like rusted chains, "You've lasted longer than the last five mortals."
Ran didn't look away from the city. "Have I?"
"They burned. Inside. Some cracked. Some burst."
"I don't feel broken," Ran said.
"No," the demon said, "you're just becoming old."
That night, he traced strange sigils on his skin with ash and did not know why.
He prayed once, out of habit. The words tasted like sand in his mouth.
Hell wasn't just torment. It was erosion. Of the mind, the soul, the self.
And Ran was starting to understand: the greatest horror wasn't pain.
It was becoming something that belonged here.
Before he went to sleep though and opened himself up to memory dreams, he decided to research what must have happened to him.
The Book of Calidation was his hope and it did not disappoint him.
For some reason he'd never read about the Blazes, but now he was going to.
Finding the page he needed, he slowly began to read to himself.
Time as it is known to the mortals of Kurana, does not exist in Naraku. The passage between seasons and events possess a complicated fluidity most mortals would call irregular.
For mortals, time progresses in a length-form, going ever forward. In Naraku time flows along the widths of reality.
This means that while the future for mortals in tomorrow, the future for the denizens of Naraku are their alternate realities.
Time progresses through alternate realities Instead of tomorrows. A person synchronizes with their alternate self every 'new day' in Naraku. Alternate selves are known as kagami-hankyo.
Ran gasped as heard that name. It felt like years since he'd heard it last. It was familiar, but he couldn't remember where he'd heard it from.
He paused his reading and racked his brain.
When he finally remembered, the gasp that escaped him echoed around the room.