Azmaik lay on the frozen ground, half of his worm-form twitching, steam rising from his frost-burned body. His face of what remained human of it looked almost calm now. The white of the tundra around them stretched endlessly, as if the world itself had stopped breathing.
Tom stood above him, chest heaving, his hand trembling faintly from exhaustion. His transparent aura flickered like a candle fighting to stay alive in the wind.
For a moment, neither spoke. The silence wasn't peace, it was aftermath.
Azmaik exhaled a shaky laugh, his voice torn and brittle.
"You really think you've won, don't you….?"
Tom didn't answer. His eyes reflected the fading auroras above them.
Azmaik coughed, blood and frost spilling from his mouth.
"You fight well.… you don't understand yet. You and I.... we're built from the same sin. The same curse that made us fight for something that doesn't exist anymore."
Tom finally spoke, his voice low, almost humanly tired.
"You call it a curse," he said, taking a slow step closer, "but you used it as an excuse."
Azmaik's single working eye twitched. "Excuse?"
Tom looked down at him, his shadow falling over the broken creature. "You talked about control, destiny, the Overseer." his voice cracked slightly, the emotion leaking through. "You wanted this. You chose to become the thing that devours everything around you. Just so you wouldn't feel weak."
Azmaik's breath faltered. "Weakness…" he muttered. "You think you know weakness?"
Tom crouched beside him.
"I do." His tone was low, shivering with quiet rage and pain. "I've lived through it. I've been going through it after I got spawned."
He paused his face half-lit by the dim black of his aura.
"You want to know who I am?"
"I'm you."
Azmaik blinked an eye eerily, his breath fogged weakly. His lips trembled in realization.
Tom continued, his voice steady now, each word heavy with exhaustion and human truth.
"I've hated. I've destroyed. I've lost people I swore to protect. Every battle I fought, I told myself it was for others. But deep down, it was always to bury what I didn't want to see."
He clenched his fist, his veins glowing faintly blue. "That same hunger.… that turned you into this thing, it's in me too."
Azmaik's eye widened. For the first time, there was no arrogance, just a strange sadness.
"You think confession changes what's coming?"
Tom shook his head slowly. "No."
He stood, the wind tugging at his tattered coat. "But it means I'll face it differently."
Azmaik tried to speak, but his body was failing, ice cracked across his chest.
Tom looked down once more. His voice softened, almost mournful.
"I don't hate you, Azmaik. You're just what I could've become…. if I stopped believing there was still something left worth saving."
Azmaik's breath slowed. The frost around him began to settle.
He whispered, "Then maybe…. that's why you're still standing."
Tom turned slightly, his silhouette outlined by the faint glow of the northern lights. He said. "I'm just too stubborn to fall yet."
The last remnants of wind howled through the frozen plain. Azmaik's body stopped. The endless white stretched around them again.
Tom didn't look back. His face hardened. His voice was a whisper only the wind heard it,
"I'm you.… but I chose to change."
He walked into the storm, leaving the fallen Polar Highness to the silence he'd made.
Azmaik took a deep breath, ice still cracking beneath his feet, his voice low and steady as he began to speak.
"The Acurus Tiama…. they were working for the Sun Presence long before I even existed," he said, his tone calm but hollow. "Centuried. I didn't even know what they were at first. I only joined their web much later. When I did, the chains were already there."
He turned his gaze to the dim horizon, where the mist had begun to gather again. "I was born in a place called Harrow's End," he continued. "A mill town built on rot and iron. The air reeked of rust, the river was black from the factories and every wall there seemed to sigh with something tired."
Tom stayed quiet. Azmaik's words carried a rhythm, a confession meant for no priest, only for the one that followed war.
"It was autumn when I was born," he went on, "the same day the sky dimmed halfway. A solar eclipse happened as I heard, enough to make the sunlight sick. The whole hospital turned grey. My mother said the air grew. They called it a bad omen. They were right."
He let out a small laugh, bitter and dry.
"My mother swore she saw black tendrils wrapping around the cord when I came out. She thought the void itself reached for me before I could cry. My father left a few days before my birth. All he left behind was a note written in his own blood — 'The void calls.'"
Azmaik's expression hardened. "She went insane after that. They said she already was, but I saw it…. the way she looked at me, like I was the thing that ruined her mind. She used to murmur while sewing 'You're the reason those shadows follow me.' Sometimes she'd hold me under cold water until I stopped moving or breathing, then cry and apologize, calling me her little miracle."
He paused again, looking down at his trembling hands.
"In Harrow's End, children threw stones at me. The church refused to let me inside. The priest said my eyes reflected something that shouldn't exist. Once, they locked me in a coal shed for three days because they said I was talking to something through the walls. And maybe I was."
Tom didn't move. He simply listened.
"My mother…. one night she tried to sew my mouth shut," Azmaik said quietly. "She said if she didn't, the cursed lines would crawl out from my lips. The next morning she was gone. She succumbed to her demons, found hanged in the attic with a noose fashioned from her sewing threads. They tried to burn the home. They said fire would purify what was left. I ran before the flames reached me."
He gave a tired smile.
"I was unwanted from the start. Every eye saw me as a reminder of something they didn't understand. You have the right to hate me. I was the omen they feared."
"After my mother's death," he said, "I was taken in by a man who called himself a servant of God. He was…. pious, yes. He preached kindness in daylight. He stood in the town square, feeding the poor, quoting verses about mercy and forgiveness. Everyone loved him. But when the doors closed at night, it was different."
His eyes drifted, unfocused, like watching ghosts replay their lines.
"He would make me kneel and recite scripture while he whipped me with a belt carved with Bible verses. The cuts formed words on my back like crimson scriptures, they used to say. I became his living gospel, bleeding faith into skin."
Tom stayed silent. The wind between them grew cold again, as though echoing that house of prayer and punishment.
Azmaik continued softly, "That's when the dreams began. They weren't like normal nightmares. I'd see a vast emptiness something that breathed without lungs, thought without form. It didn't speak in words, but in images. Suns burning backwards. Oceans made of eyes. It showed me everything collapsing, over and over."
He paused, his tone flattening.
"I named it the Sun. Because that's what it looked like in those dreams. A light too bright to mean hope. Not a god. It talked to me, telling me that the world's kindness was just a mask stretched over rot. That all we do—pray, love, build—is just a cheap trick to delay your sorrow. And that I could stop pretending."
His voice lowered further, trembling at the edge of bitterness.
"When I was fifteen, I made the mistake of telling someone. A school counselor. I told her about the dreams, the whispers, the light that moved like a living wound. She smiled and said I was brave for sharing."
"Next morning, two men in white coats came to the classroom. They said I needed 'help.' I thought they were taking me to talk. Instead, they locked me in a white room for days, filled me with pills that turned my thoughts to static. I could hear myself thinking, but I couldn't feel it anymore. Like my mind was drowning in syrup."
The quiet around them thickened.
"When they finally let me out," he said, voice brittle, "I realized something. The world isn't broken, Tom. It's built that way. It feeds on pain. It grinds down the soft, the honest, the kind…. to keep its machine running. People like me, I was, are just fuel for its gears."
Azmaik tilted his head slightly, the faintest trace of a broken grin flickering.
"That's when I stopped believing in redemption. I stopped believing in their God, in their mercy, in anything that didn't bleed back when I did. That's when I started listening to the Sun again."
By the time he was old enough to vote, Azmaik was already a ghost wandering his own existence. He drifted from one menial job to another across the rotting spine of Harrow's End. Paper mill, tannery, smelting floor, each shift blurring into the next. The world had no place for him except the cracks between shifts, where the city's steam and soot whispered like familiar voices.
At twenty, everything changed. While scavenging copper scraps in the abandoned textile factory, he uncovered something buried beneath rust and ash. An obsidian shard, slick as oil, pulsing faintly like a living vein.
Strange runes were carved across its surface, patterns that seemed to crawl when he wasn't looking directly at them. When his fingers brushed it, a tremor ran through his skull, and the whispers that once drifted through his dreams now spoke clearly.
They called it the Presence.
A conduit. A bridge between the mind and the nothing beyond it.
The shard showed him visions not meant for mortal eyes, stars collapsing into black scars, planets folding like paper, light itself weeping into shadow. It taught him that existence wasn't cruel by accident; it was indifferent by design. Humanity's struggle, love, wars—all were flickers of static in a universe that had long since turned away. He saw bunch of people writing his life....
He tried to ignore it. Tried to be normal. Harrow's End didn't allow ghosts to heal. The factory foremen mocked his silence, underpaid him, called him "spook" and "prophet of garbage." He endured. Until endurance felt like complicity.
At twenty-five, there was a spark of something else. A woman named Clara who smiled through his silences. For a brief year, he thought maybe he could still be normal. Until one night, when she found him thrashing in his sleep, whispering in a voice that wasn't his. By morning she was gone, her fear dressed her as piety. Within weeks, rumors spread that Elias was possessed, cursed, the devil's orphan.
That's when he stopped pretending.
He began to feed the darkness in small doses. Tiny rebellions against order. A loosened screw here, a tampered valve there. Each time he watched panic ripple through the factory, he felt clarity. A quiet satisfaction mirrored the chaos that the world had long mirrored into him.
Then came the final fracture.
Age was thirty, winter morning. A machine overpressured, a boiler trembling. He knew exactly how much to loosen, how long to wait.
The explosion tore through the smog like a newborn sun.
Nine dead. Dozens injured. His former bullies lying among the ashes.
When investigators came, Azmaik stood in the smoke, unburned, watching the flames dance around him as though they recognized their maker.
He swore he heard the Sun itself whisper through the emptiness of reality,
"Now you understand."
Becoming the "Harbinger" of it,
His entire life got influenced by the Sun Presence.