In the vast and endless void of the demon realm, a tempest of impossible scale was brewing. Near a solitary planet sheathed in endless, twilight forests, the fabric of space itself churned and roiled. This was no storm of matter, but a cataclysm of spirit, a maelstrom of raw, chaotic potential screaming into being. At its heart was Ray's soul, a shattered plate offering a final, potent buffet of human emotion—the coppery tang of terror, the acid burn of rage, the chilling void of despair. The Primordial Nyrr, the First Hunger, had found it, and now it fed, devouring the last echoes of what remained of the boy. The devouring was absolute, a process that sought to erase the very concept of Ray and leave only fuel for a greater fire.
Into this storm of outer space, a tiny, almost insignificant object drifted. It was a golden orb, so small it was a miracle it was visible at all, veined with faint, persistent threads of emerald green. It was a wisp, a ghost of a ghost—the soul-remnant of the Tenth Trueborn. A hollowed-out galaxy of memory and divine identity, now without a mind to hold it, it was drawn into the crucible's heart, a leaf caught in a hurricane.
And it resonated.
The Nyrr, having feasted on the potential of Ray's death, now tasted the actuality of the Primordial's murder. It was a vintage of despair and betrayal aged to cosmic perfection, a loss so profound it echoed through the foundations of reality itself. The two tragedies, one petty and human, one cosmic and divine, harmonized in a terrible, beautiful symphony. Ray's rage at his pointless, brutal end echoed the Tenth's silent, dignified lament at his unjust fall. His desperate, final will to live resonated with the foundational, unshakeable principle of Life itself.
The Nyrr, an eternal glutton for the most potent emotions, convulsed in ecstasy. It gathered itself, multiplied, and condensed with furious, single-minded intent, pulling the two shattered, resonant existences into a single, seething point of impossible density. A storm of raw potential devoured the local void, and at its raging heart, within a space that was not a space, a new, more intimate battle for existence began.
Ray's consciousness jolted awake. It was not the warmth of life he felt, but the terrifying, white-hot heat of a celestial forge. He was the raw ore, the unshaped metal being pounded and heated, his identity the impurity being burned away. And he was not alone.
"Who are you?"
The voice that answered was not a sound. It was the groan of a dying star bearing the weight of forgotten ages. It filled the non-space, imposing a false gravity, a pressure of eons that threatened to crush Ray's nascent, fragile sense of self into cosmic dust.
"Why can't I control my soul??"said the ancient voice.
The pressure was immense, absolute. It was the weight of history, of divinity, of a fall from grace so profound it had scarred reality. Ray had no voice here, no form. He was a scream trapped in amber, a feeling of violation magnified a million times. Seconds stretched into subjective eternities under this onslaught. He endured not through any great strength or power, but through that stubborn, unyielding core of defiance that had once thought, "Over my dead body". He was, quite literally, past that point. There was nothing left for him to fear, for he had already faced the ultimate loss.He had dead.
As seconds passed, then minutes, and years bled into decades within this psychic battlefield, the divine pressure became his new atmosphere. He grew accustomed to the weight, a slave adapting to his chains. He still couldn't control his body or what he thought was his body, his essence, but he could persist. And finally, after a subjective aeon of silent endurance, he pushed back. It was not a shout of power, but a simple, stark declaration of existence, torn from the very essence of what he had been.
"I AM RAY!"
The ancient presence recoiled, not in physical pain, but in sheer, unadulterated astonishment. The mortal should have been erased, his consciousness dissolved into the background noise of the merging. It had been a certainty, it was the law that the strong devours the weak . A human soul, so fragile, could not withstand the pressure of a Primordial's core identity. It was… impossible.
"There is no use in talking, boy," the voice boomed, layering on a new, more insidious pressure—the weight of inevitability. "The Nyrr is being condensed into a physical body for my rise. You'll fade away as our souls merge. Your consciousness isn't strong enough to sustain the fusion with a divine-class soul."
Inside, the primordial was reeling. 'He should have shattered. He should have despaired. I cannot even dominate the soul of a mortal? How I have fallen.'
But Ray had already fought his greatest battle against despair on a cracked asphalt floor in a forgotten alley. He had already lost everything that had ever mattered to him. This was just another Lucas, this time wearing the face of a god and speaking with the voice of the universe. His anger, his rage, his sheer, undiluted life-force—the very things the Nyrr had craved—now became his shield and his weapon. He fought the whispers of oblivion not with divine power, but with the gritty, tangible memories of a stolen life. The sweet, explosive taste of a summer peach. The feel of warm sun on his skin after a long winter. The simple, profound injustice of a future he would never see.
"Over my dead body," he thought, not as a final plea, but as a battle cry.
And he began to do the impossible: he started to assimilate the primordial's memories. Not as a passive recipient, a vessel being filled, but as an active conqueror, a victor claiming his spoils. He felt the first, breathtaking moments of creation, the profound joy of shaping a world, the serene peace of the Great Tree. And he felt the searing, world-ending pain of the betrayal, the Fall, the utter, profound loneliness of the Witness, forced to watch his murderers rule for eternity.
The primordial, feeling his own essence being integrated, stopped thinking, and finally understood the terrifying truth. He was just a mere fragment of what he once was, a god now reduced to a speck of dust.
This mortal was not a vessel. He was a competitor. A rival consciousness fighting for dominance in a shared, unborn form. The forge was not just shaping one of them; it was shaping them both, together, into something the universe had never seen before.