Milah stood in the dim glow of candlelight, his gloved fingers running over the frayed edges of the book, the Transcending Codex—fragmented, unreliable lore. The scent of old parchment lingered, heavy with the weight of knowledge few had ever dared to comprehend. His voice, steady yet laced with something unspoken, filled the silence.
He began reading aloud:
"He was the foundation, the breath, the void. The unseen hand that wove the fabric of existence, bending reality to His will with nothing more than a thought. He did not merely shape the Realms—He was the canvas upon which they were painted, and the hand that discarded them when the painting ceased to please Him. Space stretched and folded at His command. No law, no dimension, no paradox eluded His grasp—yet the one thing He could not hold mocked the very idea of 'boundless.'"
Milah's grip tightened on the pages, his voice lowering.
"But where is He now? If He was the axis upon which this world spun, the root from which all things grew, how does one lose sight of the infinite? How does a being so absolute… simply vanish?"
His eyes flicked to the annotations scrawled in the margins, the fevered musings of a long-departed sage who had once sought the same answers. He could almost hear the desperation behind the ink, the frantic need to understand something beyond mortal reach.
"To defy Him was to erase oneself from the narrative of existence—not death, but unwriting. The Void was not His opposite—it was the raw clay His existence first sculpted into meaning, then shattered into realms. His mere presence distorted reality—what was, what is, what will be, all folding into a singularity at His feet."
"The sage wrote: 'Before time had a name, before silence was a concept—He was. And His solitude was the womb of all that is not Him. And yet…"
Milah exhaled, his breath uneven.
"And yet, He is gone. Not dead. Not defeated. Gone. His absence is not decay, not ruin, but a silence too vast for our minds to comprehend. So, then—did He leave? Or did He never belong to this world to begin with?"
The candle beside him flickered, the flame wavering as if recoiling from the words themselves. Milah flicked his fingers, staring at the dim light.
"Darkness, engulfing… and light, carving its way through. The endless battle between the two... but who truly wins? Light? Darkness?"
His fingers creased the worn leather cover as he whispered his own answer, barely audible over the crackling fire.
"Perhaps neither."
The greatest power leaves the deepest silence when it departs.
A tear fell, cascading down his face as he quickly wiped it off.
He let out a quiet chuckle, shaking his head. "Ah, let's see where that Leonardo boy is now."
With a purposeful stride, Milah closed the book with a soft thud and pocketed it on the shelf of his minor library.
The walls seemed to shift and blend, as if an artist had thrown paints of contrasting colors onto a canvas without care, each stroke wild and chaotic. Destruction melded into beauty, the chaos somehow harmonized into a single, breathtaking image.
As Milah moved, his form shifted, adapting like the very space around him. His features blurred, his clothes transformed, and by the time he approached the doorway leading out, he was someone... something new.
Milah stepped onto the cobblestone street at one of the thousands of entrances to the below sky district.
The sky district hung above, glittering with light that reflected off the glass and steel, though the ever-present glow surrounding Ghent's core remained.
He walked down the same path Leonardo had taken, his new appearance blending into the crowd. As he passed, his ears caught snippets of conversation from two boys hurrying by, their words tinged with excitement and dread.
"Could you hush? Rumors say a dragon killed everyone in the New Lift!" one of the boys exclaimed, his tone more excited than it should have been, given the gravity of the situation.
"What do you mean?" his friend, a teenager, asked, his brow furrowed with concern.
"It happened a few hours ago! Hector, the conductor, sent it out!" The boy giggled, as if relishing the fear that spread with the news.
"Wait... what? Another reason why we shouldn't prioritize skills, man. Those people go crazy!" the teen said, though his voice wavered, disbelief creeping in.
Milah's gaze followed them, his expression unreadable beneath the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat. His clothes had changed again, now reflecting a mysterious, almost brooding presence; within this state he is necessarily weaker. He let out a slow breath, the air cool against his lips.
"That explains the souls moving upward. Don't tell me the boy's already dead… It hasn't even been a week."
His eyes wandered to the ever-present colossal stem at the edge of the district, splitting the sky like a divine staff, ever-watching, ever-judging.
Milah exhaled slowly, his voice low and edged with restrained power. "That damn sage..."
A faint aura pulsed from his body. For a heartbeat—or perhaps several—the world around him halted. Time itself seemed to flinch. No one moved. No one could.
He murmured, almost to himself, "I was starting to like the anomaly too."