The hug felt like an eternity; it felt so good. Each deep, resonant thud of Wyvern's heartbeat vibrated through Illirim's chest, a steady drum in the silence. The beast's scales radiated a comforting, warmth against his cheek, smelling a little bit like dry stones. He could stay here forever.
It felt... like Mother. The world dissolved into soft, warm static, until a wet, rough sob broke through the stillness.
Illirim shot up from Wyvern's side, head turning toward the sound. A few meters away, near the tower's shadowed base, lay the man he'd left earlier. The air tasted suddenly weird, charged with someone else's grief.
Illirim slowly walked closer, his smile bright and unwavering. Someone's sad? Why? He stopped over the black-armored figure.
The man trembled, tears leaving shiny tracks through the dust on his face. Illirim tilted his head, sky-blue eyes wide.
"Mister? Are you okay?" His voice held the high, melodic curiosity of a child finding a wounded bird.
His hand hovered, pale fingers inches from the man's shuddering shoulder. Then, a flash of ice-cold memory: Mother's throat beneath his palms.
The creeping void-darkness at his back. The phantom scent of lavender and roses choked him.
Illirim recoiled, scrambling backward. "I... I'm sorry, mister. I can't help you..." He sank to the ground, shoulders slumping. For three heartbeats, his face was hollow, vacant. Then, like a switch flipping, radiant joy flooded back. "Whee!" He flopped onto his back.
Death-energy prickled against his skin, cold and sharp. He wove it effortlessly, spinning writhing spheres of purest black.
They pulsed like diseased hearts in his palms. A high, fragile laugh escaped him as he juggled them skyward, watching them swallow the dim light.
Plop. The sound was unnervingly soft, like ink dripping onto water.
"What are you doing?" The voice cut through his focus. Illirim shrieked, the death-spheres winking out with soft pops. He warped upright in a flash. Beside the armored man stood the leaf-robed entity, its gaze locked onto Illirim. The scent of pine sap and crushed greenery suddenly spiked in the air.
"Oh! Hello there, Mister Leaves! Your friend is hurting!" Illirim chirped, pointing at the prone figure.
The Angel's eyes narrowed, scanning Illirim, blond hair, sky-blue eyes, the unsettling void behind his smile. Recognition dawned.
Fuck, the Angel thought, a cold knot tightening in its core. The Butcher Child. Instinct screamed warp away. His gaze flicked to E.K., vulnerable, exposed.
No, it realized, a sliver of grim certainty cutting through the fear. He's the Knight. Let the storm come. "Good luck, dear Knight," it murmured, vanishing with a soft noise of displaced air and ozone.
Illirim giggled, waving at the empty space. "Silly Leave man..." His attention snapped back. "Oooh! Look, Wyvern!" He clapped, bouncing on his toes. "Mister Black Armor stopped crying! He got better!"
He skipped to E.K.'s side and crouched, peering with unnerving intensity. The silence stretched, heavy with Wyvern's low, rumbling breaths and the tower's ancient hum. Then, the man's eyelids fluttered open. Illirim beamed, leaning in until his face filled E.K.'s vision.
"Oh, Hello there mister!" The voice was high-pitched, unnervingly cheerful. Too happy.
E.K. blinked, vision hazy. A figure blurred before him... a child? His heart gave a single, heavy beat.
"Son?"
The whisper scraped against his throat. The crushing guilt was gone, cleaned by Tyr... but in its place? A hollow ache, vast and cold. A different kind of pain, heavy like a stone in his chest.
Sadness? He couldn't name it. He just felt empty. And this child's unwavering stare, bright and unnerving, banged against his nerves.
E.K.'s presence, dampened by the Mirror Realm, began to seep back. a slow, cold tide returning.
He scanned the area. No trace of the Angel. "Figures," he thought, the word sounded like he already expected that.
He pushed himself upright. No physical pain, just a profound weariness in his soul, an anchor tied to his being. His surroundings snapped into focus.
The encounter with Tyr felt like a dream that you would have during a deep, deep sleep, one where when you'd wake up, questioned if it was a memory or indeed a figment of your own consciousness.
Leaving behind only the cold certainty of the truth he'd been shown, not yet felt.
Sunlight hurt his eyes, harsh and unforgiving. For a fractured second, he saw them. Four figures, distant, shimmering like heat. His wife? His children? They didn't radiate malice, only a deep, silent sorrow that pressed against his heart.
But the fourth... a vortex of pure, icy hatred, radiating a malice so intense it felt like needles on his skin.
Then, gone. Faster than they appeared. The afterimage in his retinas.
His gaze finally settled on the Wyvern. Its white-gold scales caught the light, almost painfully bright. "That's a rare species, kid," E.K. murmured, his voice weak, rough as sandpaper. He pointed a slightly trembling hand.
Illirim followed the gesture, his smile widening impossibly. "Haha, thank you, mister!" The words filled with artificial glee. E.K. stayed silent, gaze drifting, still adrift in the Tyr's realm's echo.
Illirim tilted his head, the relentless cheer faltering for a microsecond, replaced by a flicker of something sharp and watchful.
"Is there something, mister?" The question held a sliver of genuine inquiry beneath the chirpy tone.
E.K. pressed his palms hard against his forehead, as if trying to hold back the rising tide of the past. A deep, shaky breath tore from him.
"I learned something today."
"Ohhh!"
Illirim clapped his hands once, a loud clap in the quiet.
"What did you learn, mister?"
He sat down cross-legged, leaning forward with unsettling eagerness. The glee was slipping, replaced by a hungry curiosity.
This stranger... he felt... familiar. Broken? Like him? Warm? He couldn't tell.
E.K. remained silent for a long moment, the silence palpable with the Wyvern's low, anxious rumble and the hum of the ancient tower.
"Tyr showed me... about my family," E.K. began, his voice flat, devoid of the relief it should carry. "The assassin. The... cosmic decree. It... wasn't my fault."
He said the words, but they felt hollow, recited. Like stones dropped into a well, no splash, no echoes because of the dropped stones. His eyes remained shadowed.
What if Tyr lied? What if it was just... comfort?
Illirim's radiant smile vanished.
"Oh..."
A simple sound, full with awkward confusion.
"That's... terrible?"
He fidgeted, the question mark loud. He truly didn't know how to process this. Empathy was a language lost to him.
Then it hit.
"YOU LEFT US TO DIE E.K.! TO DIE! YOU SHOULD HAVE DIED INSTEAD OF US!"
Gonk's voice wasn't a memory; it was a physical assault. It slammed into E.K.'s skull, a spike of pure agony. Pressure built, monstrous, crushing.
He doubled over, gasping, nails digging bloody halfmoons into his scalp. The guilt for his family might be gone, but the Black Sun... it now had the stage entirely.
Unopposed. A monstrous, festering wound laid bare.
E.K.'s hand shot towards his sword hilt, trembling violently. His breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. "No Gonk... Please..." he muttered out.
"DIE!"
The command was final. Primal fear overrode everything. E.K.'s presence, his power, rebooted.
It exploded outwards. An invisible tsunami of pure, crushing despair. It slammed into the Wyvern. The beast shrieked, a sound of pure, animal terror.
Instinct conflicted with loyalty. For a heartbeat, it hesitated, muscles ready to leap towards Illirim. Then survival won.
With a final, heartbreaking screech, it launched to the sky, wings beating frantically against the oppressive weight, fleeing into the discolored Desolace sky.
Illirim saw it. His world shattered. "NO!! WYVERN!!" The scream shot from his throat, raw and primal, laced with genuine, soul-crushing loss.
Then...
silence.
His wide, sky-blue eyes snapped back to the source. To the black-armored man radiating the terror that stole his only friend.
The warmth, the pain, the strangeness, it all clicked into place with dreadful certainty.
"No..." A soft, disbelieving murmur escaped him.
His face went utterly blank. No glee. No sadness. Just cold, absolute shock. The cheerful facade gone, leaving behind the raw, confused child beneath.
This... kind, broken man? Is... my target?
Then...
cold.
A deeper cold than Desolace had ever known. An absence. A void. It seeped into the air, stopping sound, sucking out warmth. E.K. felt it too, snapping his head up.
His mission. The core of the darkness.
The Walker of the Lightless manifested. Not with a bang, but with the silent inevitability of a void swallowing light.
He stood behind Illirim, hands resting lightly on the boy's shoulders. A possessive, chilling grip.
E.K.'s eyes widened. The Walker's form... shimmered, flowed, reformed.
Gonk's familiar, rage-contorted features.
Kima's stern, disappointed gaze.
A fluttering, fragile butterfly.
Then... his wife.
Her face etched with profound sorrow.
Each shift was smooth, silent, and utterly horrifying. A flicker in the Walker's borrowed eyes, not rage, but something colder, sharper: disdain.
"Hello there, knight..." The voice was calm. Dispassionate. The sound of cold logic. It held no reverberation, it simply was.
E.K. remained silent, muscles ready, knuckles white on his sword hilt.
Illirim trembled slightly, not with fear, but profound confusion. He felt... his father? A phantom warmth, distant and strange, radiating from the entity holding him.
Father? Is it...?
E.K. started to draw his blade, the Khulain sliding against the scabbard with a sound like tearing reality.
"No need, Knight." The Walker raised one hand from Illirim's shoulder. It pointed a single, utterly ordinary finger at E.K. and snapped.
A Crack.
Like thin ice breaking over a deep lake.
A wave of absolute, soul-numbing apathy washed over E.K. His adaptive power... stuttered. Failed.
He felt nothing. No fear. No anger. Not even the crushing weight of the Black Sun guilt.
Just... void. A chilling emptiness. Confusion warred with the unnatural calm.
"You feel this, Knight?" The Walker asked, its tone clinical, observing a fascinating reaction.
"Do you feel the weight lifting?" The question held no malice, only analytical curiosity.
E.K. did. The crushing burdens were gone. But it wasn't relief. It was obliteration. A terrifying nothingness. He stared at the Walker, his own eyes reflecting the void imposed upon him.
The Walker leaned its borrowed face, currently Gonk's, etched with cold reason, close to Illirim's ear. Its voice dropped to a deadly, precise whisper, each word a knife:
"He."
Pause. The air became colder.
"Killed."
Pause. Illirim's breath spiked.
"Your."
Pause. The Wyvern's distant, fading cry echoed.
"Mother."
Then, the entity wearing Sao Ylith's wife's sorrowful face faded, leaving only a vacuum colder than Desolace's void. The unnatural apathy it had imposed on E.K. evaporated like snow under the sun, replaced by a surge of old dread. He tried to form the words,"I did no-", but they died as Illirim moved.
The sound wasn't loud; it was deafening, like a universal tree snapping. Illirim's small hand clenched, and space itself shook. E.K. felt it instantly, the weight of a trillion collapsing stars slammed onto his shoulders, driving his boots deep into the sandy Desolace soil with a soft crunch of stone.
His adaptive power screamed to life, a frantic feeling beneath his skin, but Gonk's hands clamped down, cold and immovable, rooting it deep within his core.
"NO! YOU DARE TO CHANGE!? TO MAKE SURE YOU SURVIVE!?" Gonk's voice echoed inside E.K.'s skull, a physical pressure against his forehead. His bones in pain, threatening to turn to dust.
He pushed. Muscles, tendons, msucles screamed in protest. Slowly, agonizingly, his spine popping like silenced gunshots, he forced himself upright, a dark towering figure against the crushing tide of gravity.
Illirim didn't scream words. A raw, harsh sound ripped from his throat, a sound of pure, broken betrayal. Sky-blue eyes, once full with joy, now burned with pure rage. Tears streamed down his face, not of sadness, but of furious, absolute rage.
His fingers danced, a grim dance, and the air shimmered. From the void he structured miniature Wyverns, skeletal, spectral, imbued with the absolute omnipresent energy of death.
A dozen. A hundred. Their silent shrieks vibrated in E.K.'s mouth as they shot towards him.
...
Time froze. Not slowed down. Stopped. The shrieking death-wyverns hung suspended, particles of dust halted mid-fall, the very hum-sound of Desolace silenced. Only E.K. moved, a shadow flowing between the frozen, stepping clear of the crushing gravity area.
He gasped, the sound unnaturally loud in the perfect stillness. His secondary power, Absolute Domination, surged this time... Clean and cold, untainted by Gonk's fury, for now.
It filled the void the apathy left, a focused point of will.
He looked at Illirim, frozen mid-yell, tears crystallized on rage-formed cheeks. The sheer, unfiltered pain in that small face was a physical blow.
Then, E.K.'s focus shattered.
The Walker reappeared for a fraction of a second, a flicker of shadow behind Illirim, wearing Gonk's face now, a silent, mocking spectator.
The sound of a crack came forth.
Illirim's eyes moved within the frozen time. A spiderweb of fractures radiated from him through the stillness. With a sound like breaking glass, he exploded free, lunging at E.K. like a feral animal.
E.K. dodged, left, right, back, a dark blur avoiding the fury of spectral mini-Wyverns Illirim now conjured and hurled with mindless fury.
Each near-miss left a trail of numbing cold, a phantom ache in E.K.'s bones. Illirim's screams were wordless, primal screams of agony and hate, echoing across the desolate plain.
Predictable. Wild. Rage-driven. Like Gonk had been in the depths of his fury.
The memory was a knife in his stomach.
"ME! YOU REALLY THINK YOU CAN FORGET THAT MOMENT?! YOU NEVER WILL!! I WILL BE WITH YOU! FOREVER!" Gonk's spectral fingers clamped around E.K.'s throat, icy and suffocating.
Distraction. A microsecond. A mini-Wyvern clipped E.K.'s shoulder.
A hiss-like sound emerged.
It wasn't pain. It was erasure. A wave of absolute negation surged through him, sucking warmth, light, life towards a terrifying void. His soul felt like it was being sucked away from his body, drawn towards an infinite, silent dark.
Pure, instinctive terror overrode Gonk's grip.
DENIED.
His adaptive power surged outwards, a silent detonation of pure will, slamming the door shut on the void. Life rushed back, a painful, gasping flood. His mind cleared, the battle-honed focus locking past his own sea of pain.
He saw Illirim clearly: the hate, the rage… and beneath it, a desperate, terrified flicker of knowing this was wrong.
His hand flew to his sword hilt. Cold Khulain met his palm. But Tyr's voice resonated, gentle yet immovable: "…Oh, the child… He is just like us..." Like us? Broken? Prisoners of pain?
Illirim's mind was a single, burning image: his mother kneeling before him, tears like gems on her cheeks, eyes hollow with a pain deeper than physical hurt. The Walker's whisper coiled around it: "HE killed momma!"
Illirim shrieked, the sound hurting his throat. He raised his hands again, space warping violently around E.K., gravity wells like quadrillion black holes blooming.
E.K. adapted, weaving through the distortions, the crushing forces sliding off his reinforced being like water.
"NO! YOU WILL DIE!" Illirim's voice cracked. More gravity. More death-wyverns. MORE. The assault was a hurricane of negation. To block a swooping wyvern, E.K. jerked his foot, kicking up a piece of grey Desolace dirt.
The dirt collided with the spectral wyvern. Instead of dispersing, it fused, collapsing into a small, decaying blob of reflective nothing. It hovered for an instant. E.K. glanced at its surface.
Reflected not in glass, but in the void-blob, was Illirim. Not the raging demon, but the child. Sitting hunched on the ground, face buried in his knees, small shoulders shaking with silent, world-ending sobs.
The image overlapped with a memory, sharp as a sword: his own son, small and heartbroken, folded on the floor of their Mesir home, weeping over the lifeless body of a tiny hamster. The same utter devastation. The same raw silence of true grief.
E.K.'s heart beat. A physical beat, deep and aching. His adaptation faltered. The gravity pressed in, a septillion-fold weight grinding him down.
Gonk's hands found his throat again, squeezing. "DIE FOR HIM TOO! FAILURE!"
He had to reach him. Not as the Eternal Knight. As Sao Ylith. As a father who knew that shattered look. Every step was pain, bones crushing under the impossible weight, breath painful like sand in his throat.
He pushed through the distortion, seeing not the enraged Spark, but the lost boy. His son's face overlying over Illirim's fury with tears.
Illirim saw him coming. Saw the pain printed on the dark face beneath the hood. Saw the way the man moved, not with harmful intent, but with heavy, needed purpose? He saw… a flicker of light in the Knight's shadowed eyes.
Something that wasn't hate. The relentless barrage of death-wyverns seized.
Stopped.
Only the crushing gravity remained, a heavy blanket.
E.K. reached him. Arm's length. Illirim looked up, rage still burning, but now mixed with desperate confusion, the tears flowing freely. E.K. saw his son's eyes staring back from that broken face.
Slowly, deliberately, E.K. opened his arms, the movement heavy against the gravity. Not a threat. An offer.
Illirim froze. The world narrowed to that open embrace. The Walker's lie "HE killed momma!" clashed with the raw, untainted memory flooding back, unlocked by the Knight's proximity and the reflection of his own pain:
His mother kneeling, her hand on his small cheek, her voice a broken whisper, "Please, my son… If I cannot feel anything… not even when I hold you… then I'd rather not be. End it. Please." The crushing weight of her hollow eyes.
The cold hands of the Walker on her shoulders, guiding his small ones. The release he gave her. The thorn of ultimate betrayal he'd carried, not by the Knight, but by the Walker who twisted his love into a weapon, was pulled out.
A sound escaped Illirim, a small, wounded animal cry. Then silence. Profound, absolute silence, broken only by the ragged sound of their breathing.
E.K. closed the distance. His arms, heavy with the weight of universes and grief, folded around the trembling child. Illirim didn't resist. His small body, stiff with fury a moment before, simply… collapsed.
He buried his face against the cold Khulain armor, his own thin arms wrapping around E.K.'s waist with desperate, clinging strength.
The crushing gravity vanished. Gone. As if it never was.
Only the embrace remained. And the tears. Not just Illirim's now. Hot, silent tracks made paths through the dust on E.K.'s cheeks, dripping onto the child's blond hair.
He held the boy, the broken mirror of his own lost son, the victim of the same cosmic cruelty, and the dam holding back his own ocean of grief for his family, broke.
It wasn't a sob, but a deep, shivering release of his entire being, a release of pressure held for eons. He felt Illirim's smaller frame shaking against him, ruined by silent sobs, the rage fully spent, leaving only the raw, terrifying void of truth and loss.
Two souls, stuck on the desolate shore of ultimate sorrow, clung to each other in the pure silence. The only sound was the shared, varying rhythm of their breath and the soft, desperate press of cloth and armor, a fragile piece of glass against the infinite dark.
The weight of his son's death shifted, not gone, but shared, a burden made infinitesimally lighter by the broken child trembling in his arms.
Silence...
Only tears...
Only cries...
A hug...
A hug of two lost souls.