Darkness.
Not the absence of light, but sothing deeper.
Primordial of the immorial.
The kind of darkness that had existed before creation, before the first stars ignited, before reality itself had taken its current form.
Jaenor existed in this darkness as barely more than a thought. A wisp of consciousness clinging to existence through sheer stubborn refusal to dissolve completely. His whole essence was consud by Suyajna, absorbed into her ascending form. His power had been drained to nothing.
He should have been dead.
Completely, irrevocably dead.
But the Arkwright bloodline was cursed with resilience. Even reduced to almost nothing, that genetic stubbornness kept a spark of him intact. A single ember that refused to extinguish.
And Ba’narussa had saved part of him.
When they’d bonded, when he’d first summoned her and established that connection between divine beast and master, she’d done sothing instinctive. Sothing that all truly bonded companions did without conscious thought, she’d taken a piece of his essence into herself. Held it safe within her own being.
It was that piece, combined with the bloodline’s resilience, that kept Jaenor from complete dissolution.
But he was so close to the edge.
So close to simply... ending.
Gradually, awareness returned. He was completely in a state of disarray and didn’t what was happening around him. He stopped feeling or sensing the things around him when Suyajna entered the field. She had absolute control over him then.
But he was just a shell with only a wisp of his consciousness left in him.
There was no life in his eyes or in his form.
It took a lot for him to just feel the things around him. The ability to sense his surroundings, to understand that he still existed in so form.
The darkness around him was filled with stars. Billions of them, maybe trillions, spread across impossible distances. They weren’t the stars of the mortal realm; these were older, stranger, and burning with colors that had no nas in human languages.
And between the stars floated... things. Massive objects that defied categorization. So looked like continents torn free from planets, floating in void. Others were illogical shapes that couldn’t exist in three-dinsional space. Still others seed to be alive—vast creatures that swam through darkness like fish through water, existing on scales that made mortal comprehension impossible.
This was the space between planes, a deep abyssal void.
The gap in reality where different planes pressed against each other, where the rules governing normal existence beca suggestions rather than laws.
And on one of those floating landmasses, a chunk of reality perhaps a hundred feet across, made from stone that glowed with faint internal light, stood Magdalyna.
She held him in her arms, staring at him, and it was because of her that he was able to stay from being obliterated. This space was a mix of unpredictable and violent energies that could destroy even an origin-bound witch or aura-fortified man. Magdalyna was a being who belonged to this dark space; she was born in it, made from chaos itself.
She was a creature who was on par with the ascendants, but after the continuous wars and battles, she was gradually exhausting her power, and in the last battle with the ascendants, she just chose to surrender and waited for the opportunity.
She thought of just taking Jaenor and leaving but didn’t expect the Daemon god, Suyajna, to plan such an atrocious sche behind her back. To use a vessel to build her power and absorb him.
She wouldn’t have batted an eye if she hadn’t t Jaenor. Everything changed after she t Jaenor. She felt sothing that she hadn’t felt in centuries, a yearning to be with the boy who felt he was hers.
Calling it love would have been inaccurate. Even indulgent.
Magdalyna understood the word well enough. She had seen it claid, sworn, weaponized, and discarded across centuries. It was a term mortals used to give shape to impulses they did not fully understand. For beings like her, it was insufficient—too small, too soft, too easily broken.
Yet there was no other na that ca close.
What unsettled her was not affection, but awakening. A sense long dormant had stirred—an awareness of herself not as a force or an adversary, but as sothing distinctly female. Not in form, but in longing. In the quiet pull toward another presence. In the recognition of his absence when he was not near.
She had not felt that in ages.
Not since before the wars reduced relationships to leverage and survival.
With Jaenor, it was not desire in the mortal sense. It was deeper, more structural. He occupied a space in her existence that had once been empty without her noticing. His presence aligned with hers in a way that felt inevitable rather than chosen.
She did not want him.
She required him.
Not as a possession. Not as a shield against solitude. But as sothing that completed a symtry, she had not known was broken. He was compatible with her in ways that transcended emotion—temperant, endurance, and will. Where others bent or shattered under proximity to her nature, he adapted. Where others sought to control or escape her, he remained.
He was not perfect.
He was correct.
That was the distinction.
What bound her to him was not romance, nor dependency, nor illusion. It was the quiet certainty that if she were to exist beyond conflict—beyond endless reaction and resistance—he was the singular presence in which that existence could take form.
She had shaped him, guided him, and strengthened him. Not to own him, but because sothing in her recognized the necessity of his becoming. And in doing so, she had changed herself.
That was the danger.
That was the cost.
And standing at the edge of annihilation, holding what remained of him, Magdalyna understood that what she was about to give was not devotion, nor sacrifice born of guilt.
It was an alignnt.
The final acceptance that so bonds are not chosen lightly—and once ford, are not abandoned without undoing oneself entirely.
And if this was what mortals called love—
Then perhaps the word was not absurd after all.
Just painfully incomplete.
It was Jaenor’s power; it was one of the things that made him pull her to him too. She trained him, nurtured him and in ti fell in love with him, with the idea of living with him, away from this chaos.
She was beyond exhausted with the war, with those demons and humans.
They are all the sa in the end; she learned it the hard way.
But Jaenor, maybe he could be different. Or maybe she just wanted him to be.
Either way, she wasn’t letting Suyajna have him.
And the idea of becoming a part of him gave peace to her.
Her true form was visible here, away from the mortal realm’s need for human guises. She was tall, easily eight feet, with skin that seed carved from darkness itself. Her hair flowed around her like a living shadow, and her eyes burned with deep crimson fire that had witnessed millennia.
She looked down at what she held, and her ancient face showed pain so profound it seed to crack sothing in her usually controlled expression.
"You’re still here," she whispered, her voice echoing strangely in the void.
"Barely. Just a fragnt. But still here, with ."
Jaenor couldn’t respond.
Couldn’t speak.
He was too diminished, too close to final dissolution. But he could perceive her and could understand her words even if he couldn’t reply.
"I failed you," Magdalyna continued, and tears, actual tears from a being millions of years old, fell onto what remained of him.
"I tried to stop them. Tried to reach you in ti. But I was too weak, too late. And Morgana..."
Her voice broke.
"That betrayal. I never suspected. Never saw it coming."
She looked up at the void around them, at the stars and the floating masses and the impossible arrangent of this place between places.
"But you’re not dead yet. Not completely. There’s still a chance. A slim one, but I didn’t drag us both here just to watch you fade."
She shifted her grip on him, holding him more securely.
"This space, it’s called the Interplanar Void. The gap between realms. Our world, Evanisckar, is just one realm of existence among countless others. And this void is what separates them, what keeps different realities from bleeding into each other."
Her crimson eyes scanned the darkness, searching for sothing.
"The void isn’t empty. It’s filled with... remnants. Fragnts of destroyed realms, energies that escaped their original dinsions, and forces that exist outside normal reality. And one of those forces is here. Close. I can feel it."
As if summoned by her words, the darkness ahead of them began to shift.
To swirl and coalesce into sothing that suggested purpose rather than random motion.
A storm was forming.
But this wasn’t weather in any conventional sense. This was chaos given form, a maelstrom of raw, unstructured power that predated order itself. It spun and churned, growing larger with each passing mont, and within it, Jaenor could perceive colors that hurt his fragnted consciousness to witness.
"Chaos Origin," Magdalyna said quietly.
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