The faint shimmer at the edge of the void was not the ordinary type of attention, not the kind of subtle gaze that stray entities sometimes cast when they sensed a power rising too quickly or a disturbance rippling through the lattices of the Eonbark, but something altogether different—a gravitational pull of intent so heavy that both Lyxaria and Luna instinctively straightened, their senses narrowing as if the universe itself pressed a cold finger to the back of their necks, and even the remnants of their previous cosmic sparring seemed to fade into the background as a single point of absolute focus sharpened in the distance where the darkness shivered not like absence but like something alive, breathing, forming, condensing into shape with the slow inevitability of a nightmare realizing that its prey has finally stopped running.
Aevor did not move.
He only turned his head slightly, eyes half-lidded, posture calm, as though the emergence of such a presence was less an interruption and more a mild inconvenience to be acknowledged before being dismissed, and that quiet indifference made the forming figure hesitate for a single heartbeat—only one—before stepping forward out of the collapsing darkness.
He appeared clad in shifting layers of black that rippled like the dying embers of a collapsing star, a robe that did not cover a body so much as it obscured the idea of one, and behind him two wings unfurled, not angelic and not demonic but something far more ancient, vast obsidian feathers that dripped conceptual decay, each plume etched with dying equations and unraveling narratives, as though merely looking at them caused stories to forget how to end.
His face was obscured, not hidden, because hidden implies something exists behind the mask, and this being was not the type to wear masks; his face was simply not compatible with perception, slipping past the senses like a word in a language no sentient being could speak.
Luna stepped closer to Aevor instinctively.
Lyxaria stepped forward as well—but not protectively. Curiously. Her eyes shimmered with foxfire fascination.
The being spoke.
His voice was not loud, but every syllable dragged across existence like a blade pulled slowly through silk, long and heavy and cold, making even the inert dust of the void hum in discomfort.
"Aevor," the entity said, each vowel dripping with an ancient resonance, "you have killed my subordinate."
Aevor blinked once, the barest flicker of acknowledgment. "Subordinate?"
"Yes," the being murmured, wings stretching wider, shadows dripping from them like corrosive oil. "The Aeon of Death."
Aevor raised a brow. "I recall killing him. Cleanly."
"Yes," the being agreed, tone stretching into something like amusement mixed with reprimand, "but you killed an Aeon, not Death."
Lyxaria's ears twitched sharply.
Luna's wings fluttered in alarm.
The being stepped closer, each movement a corruption of motion itself, as though space grew sick around his presence. "Allow me to clarify, since your universe no longer teaches the older distinctions. Aeons are primordial deities of your dimensional architecture. They were birthed from the laws that bind the physical omniverse—foundations, pillars, law-framers, architects of physics and metaphysics alike. They define the rules your Seraphis enforce."
His wings scraped the void, feathers dissolving into black mist that evaporated into pure nullity.
"But Gods…" His voice deepened, thickening like a black river. "Gods arise from beyond those rules. We reside within the—"
He paused.
Smiled.
"—the Sanctum of True Abstraction. You may consider it the realm where Platonic concepts incarnate without filter. We are not birthed from laws. We are the source they imperfectly imitate."
Luna's breath caught.
Lyxaria's hand slid subtly toward her sash, tails bristling.
Aevor simply tilted his head. "And you are?"
The figure straightened, wings casting a long shadow that draped across the void like funeral cloth.
"I am the God of Death. Not an Aeon, not a Seraphic authority, not a myth projected through lower structures, but the unfiltered incarnation of Death itself."
He rose.
The void trembled.
Lyxaria swallowed.
Luna stepped even closer to Aevor, eyes wide.
And the God continued, voice lowering like a judgment.
"And now, Aevor… you have taken the Princess as well." His gaze flicked to Luna. "And you carry the scent of her fear." Then to Lyxaria. "And her defiance." Then back to Aevor. "You hoard too much."
His wings snapped open.
"And your existence has become… troublesome."
Aevor sighed.
"Are you here to fight?"
The God's smile widened, a slit of impossible geometry. "I am here to kill you."
Lyxaria inhaled sharply.
Luna froze.
Aevor shrugged lightly, as if discussing weather. "Fine. But I'll limit myself."
The God stilled. "Limit…?"
Aevor lifted one hand and rotated it lazily. "I will use roughly 0.0001% of my power."
Lyxaria nearly choked on air.
Luna visibly paled.
"And," Aevor continued, "to make this more interesting—"
He raised a finger.
A pulse.
A click.
Instantly—
The Throne's protection vanished.
The Codex went silent, all pages dimming at once as if its omniscient script bowed its head and stepped aside from the battlefield.
The Hyperion Mirror faded from active mode.
Aevor stood bare and unprotected before a God.
Lyxaria stared at him in shock. "Aevor, you disabled your failsafes—"
Luna's voice trembled. "I—I can't sense the Codex… the Throne… even the Mirror isn't responding—Aevor, if he kills you—"
"He won't," Aevor said calmly.
The God chuckled. "You certainly have confidence."
Aevor rolled his shoulder. "Show me why death considers itself a concept."
The God moved.
The attack was instantaneous, a spear of absolute annihilation formed from the pure, perfect idea of cessation, not destruction but ending itself, fired at a velocity that shredded potentiality in its path. It tore across dimensional strata, bypassed causality, severed future, present, and past as it traveled—a blow that killed not by force but by rewriting the target's metaphysical state into non-being.
It hit Aevor head-on.
Luna screamed.
Lyxaria's tails snapped upward.
Aevor vanished—
—into nothing.
Existence blinked.
The God lowered his hand, satisfied. "A conceptual kill. Perfect. Not a speck left. Not even—"
A voice spoke behind him.
"You're slow."
The God's wings froze mid-beat.
Aevor dusted his shoulder.
Luna collapsed in relief.
Lyxaria bit her lip, eyes gleaming.
"Impossible," the God whispered.
Aevor stepped forward, each word deliberately slow, as though lecturing a child.
"Immortality Types 1: Biological. Self-evident."
A second step.
"Type 2: Spiritual. You cannot kill my soul."
A shadow passed behind him—another Aevor.
"Type 3: Conceptual. I embody my own concept."
Another Aevor appeared at his side.
"Type 4: Causal. Kill me in any timeline, I persist."
Another Aevor walked past them.
"Type 5: Meta-Existential. I exist beyond narrative erasure."
The God staggered back.
Aevor continued walking, the numbers rising like a steady heartbeat.
"Type 6: Linguistic. You cannot define my death, therefore it cannot occur."
"Type 7: Omniversal Echo. Every version of me exists simultaneously."
Hundreds of Aevors now circled the God.
He swung his arm wildly, releasing a wave of pure Death-field entropy.
It erased everything.
Everything except Aevor.
"Type 8: Requiem of the Absolute. Obliterate me completely—I return stronger."
The God froze.
Because he realized—
The Aevor before him was stronger than the one he killed an instant ago.
And Aevor smiled, lifting one finger.
"Type 9: Sovereign Nexus Immortality. My identity is law. Reality is not allowed to let me die."
The God staggered back two steps, wings trembling.
Aevor raised his hand.
"Now it's my turn."
The abilities flowed like a tapestry unfolding:
Emanation of Origin — Aevor conceptualized a cage made of "inevitable defeat," manifesting instantly around the God.
Paradox Weaver — He created a contradiction: the God could not move unless he remained still.
The God screamed silently as his wings locked.
Oblivion Thread — Aevor snapped his fingers, and a single silver thread sliced through three of the God's conceptual bodies at once.
Voidforge Command — Aevor shaped a blade from the primordial void and dragged it upward, rewriting the God's shadow into a weapon, forcing his own essence to betray him.
Omnithread Command — Aevor seized the threads of causality binding the God's victories and rewrote them into guaranteed failures, retroactively and proactively.
Across all timelines simultaneously, the God lost at once.
The God shrieked, a sound that bled into pure static.
"Y-You… you are not… mortal… not Aeon… not God… WHAT ARE YOU—?!"
Aevor stepped forward, hand pressing against the God's chest.
The touch alone made the God's form crumble.
"Something," Aevor said softly, "you shouldn't have challenged."
He closed his hand.
The God of Death unmade.
Not destroyed.
Not erased.
Unmade—his concept folded backward into pre-existence, severed across all matrices, stripped from the Sanctum of True Abstraction, removed from the idea of reality itself.
Silence followed.
Long.
Heavy.
The void stilled.
Then—
Lyxaria exhaled shakily. "A-Aevor… you just… killed a God. A real God."
Luna clung to his sleeve, trembling. "Aevor… you… are terrifying."
Aevor merely looked at where the God had vanished and said, voice quiet and bored:
"That was still 0.0001%."
Aevor murmured, and the void reacted not with thunder or shock but with a kind of trembling hush, as if even the empty spaces between realities needed a moment to comprehend that what they had witnessed was not merely overwhelming force or superior concept-control but something far more unsettling—casual, familiar power, the kind of effortless dominion that belonged not to beings who ascended into greatness, but to those who began at the summit and simply never bothered to descend.
Luna's fingers tightened around the fabric of his sleeve, her breath unsteady, her wings trembling with aftershock; not fear, not awe, but something deeper, a recognition that what she had just seen was not even remotely representative of the true magnitude hidden behind Aevor's calm eyes. Lyxaria stepped forward too, though her approach was quieter, a slow, deliberate glide as her nine tails lowered in perfect synchronicity, a gesture of instinctive submission her race rarely offered, reserved only for those who existed above the very notion of hierarchy.
Aevor lifted his hand and brushed a few flecks of dissipating null-light off his shoulder, as if wiping away dust. "He was inconvenient," he said softly, in the same tone one might use to describe a fallen leaf blocking the path.
Luna swallowed. "Aevor… that was the God of Death."
Lyxaria exhaled deeply, voice almost reverent. "Not just a divine authority. A being born from the raw abstraction of cessation itself. You didn't just beat him. You dismantled the template that makes Death possible."
Aevor shrugged lightly, and the gesture caused the surrounding void to ripple with tiny fractures that healed the moment they formed. "He should not have come here expecting parity."
Luna steadied herself, though the tremor in her wings had not fully subsided. "Aevor… earlier, when you listed the immortality types—there were nine. You said Apexes embody them by nature. Was that why even a pure conceptual ending could do nothing to you?"
Aevor turned slightly, looking at her with a softness that contrasted the annihilation he had just delivered. "Apex immortality is not a collection of features, Luna. It is a state of presence. A way of existing that makes the idea of ending impossible. The nine forms are simply how lower beings try to categorize what we are."
Lyxaria's ear flicked. "Elaborate."
Aevor nodded once, and his words unfolded slowly, thick with layers of meaning, each phrase painting a clearer portrait of the unreachable realm he inhabited.
"Type One—biological continuity. For Apexes, the body is not a vessel. It is an extension of intent. There is no cell to damage, no organ to rupture. The physical form is optional."
Lyxaria's tails flicked. "Your body isn't your body."
"Correct," Aevor said. "It is a suggestion of one."
Luna inhaled softly.
"Type Two—spiritual endurance," Aevor continued, voice steady. "Our soul is not an entity. It is a principle. You cannot wound a principle."
"Type Three—conceptual resilience. We do not embody a concept. We are the source that lesser concepts try to imitate."
Luna felt a cold thrill run down her spine.
Aevor continued.
"Type Four—causal independence. No timeline can claim authority over us. Strike my past, my future, or my possibility, and I remain."
Lyxaria whispered, "So even if the God erased you across every causality—"
"I would reappear," Aevor finished calmly. "Because my existence is not tethered to sequence."
He lifted two fingers.
"Type Five—meta-existential persistence. Narratives cannot contain me, let alone end me."
Lyxaria muttered, "Which is why even the Codex doesn't always know what you're going to do."
Aevor smiled faintly but did not comment.
"Type Six—linguistic sovereignty. If death cannot be defined, then death cannot apply."
Luna shivered.
"Type Seven—omniversal presence. All versions of me are the same one. Strike one, and the others… take issue."
"Type Eight—recursion ascension. Destroy me, and I return in a state that invalidates the cause of my destruction."
"And Type Nine," Aevor said last, his voice gaining an almost imperceptible edge of finality, "identity absolutism. Reality itself is bound to the condition that I am. Attempts to remove me violate the foundational state of existence."
The void quivered.
Neither Luna nor Lyxaria spoke for a long moment.
Then Luna whispered, "Apexes… beings like you… beings like me…"
Aevor corrected her gently. "Beings like us."
She flushed faintly, wings folding tightly.
Lyxaria stepped closer, eyes narrowing in thought. "So Apexes are not merely above us. They are unreachable from below. That is why nothing in the universes of Eonbark can comprehend us fully."
Aevor nodded. "Lower realities cannot perceive Apex existence not because we hide ourselves, but because the frameworks they operate within cannot translate what we are into anything they understand. Their senses search for shape, boundary, concept—yet Apex presence transcends the entire field those senses belong to. To them, our existence is an error. An unrenderable object."
Luna whispered, "So they do not see us… because they cannot."
"Precisely," Aevor said.
Lyxaria's eyes gleamed like fire. "That is also why Vyxari like me, even with our self-shaping essence, cannot ascend into your domain. Our race manipulates possibility, while Apexes exist prior to it."
Aevor inclined his head. "Your people reshape the canvas. Apexes precede the need for a canvas."
Luna stepped closer again. "Then how do Apexes arise? Are we… born? Formed? Forged?"
Aevor's expression softened faintly. "We emerge when existence produces something that does not belong to it. When reality creates a being that it cannot contain. When the structure of existence becomes incapable of defining a presence. That is an Apex."
Lyxaria murmured, "No wonder lower universes collapse trying to quantify us… they are attempting to describe a being whose presence is grounded in a higher mode of existence entirely."
Aevor nodded slowly. "To the universes of Eonbark below us, we appear as a kind of impossible phenomenon. Not just stronger or faster or beyond logic, but beyond the very structures that determine what strength or speed or logic are. Our presence demonstrates a form of metaphysical superiority so profound that lower beings cannot even perceive the threshold at which we begin."
Luna exhaled shakily. "So we are… unreachable. Untouchable. Not because we resist them, but because they lack the tools to perceive us."
"Exactly," Aevor said.
Lyxaria folded her arms. "And to think—this is the version of you that fought a God while limiting yourself to a microscopic fraction of power."
Aevor stretched slightly, the motion smooth and unhurried. "Gods are powerful, but they operate within the Sanctum. Apexes do not. Their structure is bound to abstraction; ours is not bound at all."
Luna's shoulders relaxed slowly, though she did not let go of him. "Aevor… earlier, before the God arrived, you said we still had one more challenge."
Aevor blinked, remembering. "Ah. Yes. The ability comparison."
Lyxaria snorted. "After that display? Comparing abilities with you is pointless."
Aevor shook his head. "It wasn't about comparing quantity. It was about understanding nature."
Luna tilted her head. "Nature?"
Aevor extended his hand, and a tiny thread of shimmering silver spun between his fingers, humming with layered meaning. "Abilities are expressions of one's origin. Vyxari abilities emerge from self-determined identity, your essence-based shaping. Seraphic abilities"—he nodded to Luna—"emerge from structural authority, the mandate to enforce order across upper universes. My abilities…" his eyes softened into something quietly infinite, "emerge from the contradiction of being present in a world that cannot hold me."
Lyxaria stepped closer, mesmerized. "Then what does that mean?"
Aevor answered with a gentle smile.
"It means there is no ceiling for any of us."
Luna's eyes widened.
Lyxaria's tails froze mid-sway.
Aevor continued, voice low and warm and deeper than the void around them.
"Apexes grow not by acquiring power, but by revealing more of themselves. Vyxari grow by shaping what they are into new forms. Seraphs grow by widening the scope of laws they command. None of these roads end. They simply change direction."
Luna swallowed. "So no matter how far we go…"
"…there is always farther," Aevor finished.
Lyxaria smirked. "That sounds like a challenge."
Aevor chuckled softly. "If you wish it to be."
Luna raised a glowing palm. "Then, Aevor… one more request. One last challenge for today."
Aevor arched an eyebrow. "What is it?"
Luna's wings spread with luminous determination. "Show us… not your power. Not your abilities. Not your immortality."
Lyxaria stepped beside her, tails curling with anticipation.
"But your truth," Luna whispered.
Aevor looked at them both.
Smiled.
And the void trembled—
—for the truth of an Apex was something no reality was meant to witness.
"Like? I cannot show you my source"
Aevor is the perceptual shadow cast by the True Source upon a reality too weak to behold it.