In the expanses of paradise, the loudest sounds were the cries of desire. The gasp of the wide-eyed tourist’s unparalleled awe and ambition. The laugh of the lover as their fingers squeezed around velveteen sheets. The chants of gamblers staking their lives, risking everything to be free from the shackles of mundanity. Another uninteresting day waned. The breeze drew clouds that veiled the dependent moon, and the wake of evening in turn woke the sanctuary of New Altra. Her lucent lights set fire to the sky like the sun had risen again. Perhaps with the flicker of streetlights and neon glows, the evening could prove different. Who knew? The night was young.

***

The elevator had no room to breathe. For the interloper Sister Kynburgh, this was unheard of. For the denizens of New Altra? It was Saturday.

ELEVATOR: “Level 15. Doors opening.”

SISTER KYNBURGH: “Come on, damnit…”

A few people gently pushed their way out, yet it was still impossible to fit a suitcase between each person. Rafe could be anywhere by now. How could she have let him out of her sight? She glanced around the corridor and blinked away the light. Everywhere here was so bright, nothing like the monastery’s lamplit halls. After some time, she noticed that everyone in the room was taking turns staring at her. She was no older than twenty - from what she could recall from her research, it was normal for a girl her age to wander around the city alone. So why were they all staring?

Slowly, Sister Kynburgh drew her hood back and a quiet gasp escaped everyone’s mouth. She was wrapped in a mottled glaucous robe and various straps and belts formed leather armour comprising various pads and braces. Her hair and skin were pallid and entirely colourless, a shade of chalk that contrasted against the elevator’s warm glow and bronze walls and floor. The only colour was in her eyes - painted a gentle velvet hue. She turned as a hand tugged at her sleeve.

MRS. CHEBERELL: “Are you going to the ULTRAMARINE? I looooove your contacts.” SISTER KYNBURGH: “The what? My… contacts?”

MRS. CHEBERELL: “Eyes, darling... Don’t tell me they’re natural.”

The mature-aged woman reeked of liquor. Her eyes widened incredulously as she leaned close, even more so as Sister Kynburgh’s eyes began to water from the stench.

MRS. CHEBERELL: “No! You have natural purple eyes?!”

MRS. DANVERS “You idiot Clem, don’t you see? She’s been aug-you-mented. Look at her arm!” Sister Kynburgh tried to pull her hand away, but the drunkards’ grips were resolute. She grimaced as they rolled up her sleeve, squeezed her arm and ran their fingers along the base of her wrist, caressing over the sacrificial scars that permanently branded her flesh - dozens of illegible runes and symbols carelessly etched across her skin, like a mother writing their child’s name on a jacket.

SISTER KYNBURGH: “Let go at once! I don’t know what an aug-u-ment is!”

MRS. CHEBERELL: “Don’t be ashamed dear. I wish I could afford an iris replacement!” MRS. DANVERS: “And you’re so young too! My, you must be quite popular…"

***

The next room over was… explosive, to put it generously. Despite the cleanliness of the room however, the enterprising Mr. Dalton was anything but distressed. How could he be, with the gorgeous Ms. Kytson by his bedside? Briefcases were strewn across the floor and a half-empty wine glass tainted the beige carpet an ugly burgundy as the room emanated with the full-bodied scent of pinot noir. The phone’s handset dangled from the nightstand - a useless solution as the mobile phone across the room began to sing.

VOICEMAIL: “Luke Dalton, sorry I couldn’t make it to the phone-”

PHONE: “Luke? Please pick up when you get this…”

The phone’s snappy dialtone sliced through the taciturn darkness that smothered the room, bar the amber lustre that trickled along the floor, fettered behind draped pewter curtains. After some time, the only sound in the room was the trickster’s ragged breath and his mistress’ pounding heartbeat.

MS. KYTSON: “You should call back. It might be important.”

MR. DALTON: “Please don’t make me get up…”

Again, the phone crooned and clattered along the tiles. Ms. Kytson buried her face in pillows as Mr. Dalton finally slithered out of the sheets.

MR. DALTON: “Hello?” PHONE: “Luke? Finally! Where were you?”

MR. DALTON: “Darling? I was-”

PHONE: “It’s been six hours! I thought you had gotten lost, or hurt, or-”

MR. DALTON: “Honey, nobody gets hurt here. Not like the colonies on the plateau.” PHONE: “Where are you? Is The Package with you?”

Mr. Dalton’s gaze initially snagged on Ms. Kytson before it eventually met The Package sitting on the dining table, buckled shut and cool to the touch.

MR. DALTON: “O-of course, darling. I’m still in New Altra, waiting for the shuttle right now.”

PHONE: “Thank goodness. It’s about time you caught a break.”

Mr. Dalton frowned and gently shook The Package in his hands. Its weight shifted from within and tilted the hardcase to either side as it tried its best to jump out of his grasp. It never occurred to him that he scaled the sides of skyscrapers, broke countless bones and won the hearts of powerful people - all for a briefcase.

PHONE: “Imagine the things we could build. Sure, it would take some time. Maybe longer than we have left. But we’d finally have control. No more suffering, no more dirty food and water, no more thieving.”

MR. DALTON: “Maybe not that last one.”

PHONE: “I’m serious. We could finally settle down on the plateau. Live a normal life, hmm?”

A normal life? The words echoed in Mr. Dalton’s head. What could be so normal about living on the edge of humanity, stealing from the rich and giving to themselves just so that they could keep living in total isolation? He leaned against the table, traced the indents of The Package with his index finger and idly gazed into the starry skyline that never seemed to end.

PHONE: “…and we’ll get time to finally raise a kid - like we’ve always wanted… Hello? Luke?”

The silence was thick enough to cut with a knife. The city skyline only seemed to grow brighter.

PHONE: “Damned phones… Luke? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

MR. DALTON: “Hmm? Yes, darling. Sorry, the shuttle’s arrived. I need to go.”

PHONE: “Okay - talk soon, yeah? You’ll answer me quickly next time won’t you?”

He felt like he never understood Mrs. Dalton at times. Or perhaps she never understood him.

MR. DALTON: “Goodbye darling. I love you.”

PHONE: “I love you too...” Mr. Dalton sat the phone on the desk and looked up to Ms. Kytson’s wily grin. He heaved a great sigh and ran his fingers through his clammy hair that laid like a second skin across his forehead. He set The Package back down.

MR. DALTON: “Now, where were we?”

***

Several floors above, partners quarreled over the fate of a man they had never met.

YARROW: “I don’t understand.”

VALERIAN: “We don’t need to understand.”

Valerian drew the window completely open, the New Altra skyline glimmering back at us in its golden, gilded beauty. More eye-catchingly, the lights and sparkles danced from the red carpets and rooftops of Idyll Hall. The city’s biennial fashion show ULTRAMARINE was in full swing. It wasn’t long before their quarry revealed itself. Her eyes escaped the cool breeze by burying themselves behind rangefinder lenses. The moon vanished behind wispy clouds as our digital watches chirped in unison. Valerian looked to Yarrow, who met her gaze with furrowed eyebrows and crossed arms. The briefcase was still open on the kitchen counter and inside, the disassembled rifle.

YARROW: “He has nothing to do with our image - why would they want him dead?”

VALERIAN: “Because perfection isn’t about talent, it's about looking better than everyone in the room.”

YARROW: “We’re not just cogs in their machine, V.”

Valerian sighed, stood up and shoved past Yarrow. She took it upon herself to silently put the sniper together, since her partner had suddenly developed a conscience in their seven years of “maintaining the image of perfection”. Yarrow leaned against the couch and shook his head. He pursed his lips and scratched at his face as he tried to find some way to reach out to his colleague, but she didn’t listen.

VALERIAN: “He’s not innocent. People don’t get idolised this quickly - especially not colonists.”

YARROW: “That doesn’t change a thing, and you know it.”

Valerian tried to return to the window but Yarrow stepped in and held the rifle frozen in her arms. His eyes met hers, yet only his were frantic. Only his breath was shallow. Only his hair dripped with sweat.

YARROW: “We can do this a different way. Trap him in the system somehow - I don’t know!”

VALERIAN: “The system is powerless. As far as I’m concerned, right this second, we are anything but.”

Valerian pushed past him again and slid the rifle’s barrel beyond the window opening. The magazine slotted into the rifle with a satisfying clunk! The Haskins-LR6 excelled at this range, and so did its operator. If she succeeded, The Supermodel wouldn’t even get the chance to scream.

VALERIAN: “You’re right. We’re not cogs in a machine.” The safety clicked off. Valerian’s reseda-tinted iris magnified. Her pupil followed The Supermodel’s dome through the scope as he strutted down the catwalk.

***

As night fell, the truth began to surface.Darkness was never a shroud, but a window to the secrets of the soul - eventually revealed for all to see, or discover. The flame of ambition burned bright and revealed all - there are no exceptions. That glance over each shoulder that skipped a hyper-metrical beat in your heart? The unwavering tremor in your finger as it hovered over the rifle’s trigger? The city held fast. Listening. Smelling. Waiting. Standing over the vacationists like an old shepherd over their flock. To call her the people’s guardian amidst the desolate wastes would be neither wrong nor right. She was the organ to a pianist. A hammer to the engineer. A knife to the assassin. Another chaotic evening had passed, for some at least. The milky dusk faded into the horizon, yet the daytime continued in New Altra - the time held no sway over the performers, watchers and the mountebanks. Perhaps with the coming of the sun and the gentle breeze through streets, morning could prove different. Nobody knew. Nobody ever would. After all, the night was only young.

Before there was consciousness, there was an itch. 

An itch that (damn all else) must be scratched at all costs. 

I can guarantee you there was a point in your life where you just couldn’t resist the itch.

It felt remarkable the first time you scratched it, no? It usually did. The second time? Sure. 

And what of the third, fourth - hell what about the twentieth?

You wanted more. Scoring your skin like rind wasn’t enough. You had to bend down and scratch, lie down and stab wince-worthy depressions into the skin with your waxy nails and eventually pick into the deeper layers but to no avail. The itch had already buried itself deeper than flesh and greater than bone.

By this point, it became greater than just a simple itch. You’ve deluded yourself in grandeur, drunk on the mere thought of euphoria. You’ve forgotten there was even a consciousness to attend to. You believed that nothing, truly nothing can quite match up to the first time you had scratched that itch. You’re not wrong. At least you got that through to your starved consciousness.

You remember it now, don’t you?

You were the victim. The fool. Your very own mark. No shame in it.

There is shame however, in regret. Not shameful as in showing remorse, apology or even repentance is undesirable - no, but shame for the individual realising their role as the sole, poignant driver of personal betrayal. Nothing grounds a man faster than the consequences of their own actions, believe me. You’d lie in bed, running your fingers along the wallpaper tracing messages inked with the ephemeral vitriol of guilt, desire - anything that dares persist in your mind as the wallpaper becomes the last tether between consciousness and the mercilessness of your own thoughts…

What do you hear? Taunts of a mistake that cost you, or someone else dearly? The whispering nothings of a lover that slipped through your fingers? Whatever it may be, it’s the only barrier between you and that wretched itch - and you can’t do anything about it.

It was your fault. Somewhere out there, you and you alone are someone else’s justification.You’ve yanked the chain, and somewhere down the links it’s snapped up at someone.

I hope you’re happy. Most people would kill to make a mark on others. Some people would kill.

Maybe that someone is you. Someone willing to cross the threshold. Someone willing to take hold of the blade and slice out a pound of flesh - no, THE pound of flesh that itches so very much?

Well? Are you that someone?

    I catch my own lip

    in this second

    knowing,

     hurting,

     lying,

        through my putrid breath.

         Unaware the worst is to come.

       When   ONE LIE      slips

       then     only            then

      I can    let               my

      ugly     tale               go

     like     robins            in

       their    cages.           But

     when    TWO LIES     are

    the       truth            to

        his       reality,          then

        how     does it           ever

        stop?   I am              the

     man     of war           of

        my      THREE           fake

      lives.   I hate            the

       facts   of their          very

         being   but the          truth

      is that  there is          no

       me       without         help

     from    THE FOUR  hands

       that      piece a      puzzle

        of a life I wish I was mine.

                                               Blood, whom                                             

  I spend my

  dreams on,

 I hate the

 mistake

in

 my

 soul,

yet

it

l

o

v

e

s

“What do you think?” I queried as my fingers roused the lily from its gentle wobble in the breeze. “Pretty? Poisonous?” she replied.

“It’s not poisonous.”

“You think?” the girl asked as she craned her head, as if seeing the petals sideways would change something about it. There was a pause before I told her to stop fretting.

The mist certainly didn’t help as I plucked the bundle from the corner of the bushy knoll, my cotton shirtsleeves already unfurled by the soil as the bush speckled my forearms and face with dew in retaliation. “Why pull me away so early in the morning if you’re not going to let me pick flowers too? I want to know what we’re looking for too.”

My eldest and only child was completely spotless - seemingly immune to the gentle rain. Her mother would do something unimaginable to the pair of us should something befall her or the garments. Even her hair bounced perfectly to capture her heart-shaped portrait in a chocolate frame that created a caramel melange with her rye skin and candied eyes. A single glance and she was “Her Girl”. Never "His Moppet" or anything of the sort but it’s probably better that way. She was always much more amiable than I who was reclusive to the degree in which our social outings were more tedious than entertaining.

“You know what your mother would say about our excursions.”
“That doesn’t explain why I can’t help. I always get to help.”

Soon, the morning songbirds cooed and we followed the muddy trail that led back into town, zephyr-lily in tow. Through the cobbled underpass that was around the corner of an old man’s street. When we first moved to Viscontia after having my daughter, the old codger never missed the opportunity to enjoy what little silence there was in the day. Peppery enough to mind his own yet comfortably tempered to exchange a word or two before carrying on with his novel. I held my breath but for the first time in seventeen years, the old man was not there to greet us. My breath wavered as if something solid had hammered me in the guts, to which my daughter replied with a pensive gaze.

We made it to the corner of a lane named after the greenery, ironically the streets that marked the boundary between our comfortable neighbourhood and the polluted vernacular of the Other Side. Self-imposed boundaries that separated the comfortably living from the ones who were forced to fight over who got the least sawdust in their bowls. Every time I passed this street was another reminder of how elated I was to have been recognised as a skilled craftsman and allocated a home befitting of my talents, at least that’s what my legal papers tell me. The smog that the factories billowed in clouds loomed as an acrid shadow over the bridge that connected both sides of the canal, serving as a dreadful sign as if to say “don’t cross or you will never be seen again…”. At times I wondered if those on the Other Side have stood at the edge as we do now and imagined a foreboding sense of fatality at the sight of wispy clouds and cool-coloured skies, enough to have developed an immense fear of chroma and smooth air that suffocating was the better option. It was absurd, yet I still wondered why they never tried to take up their blades and scale our walls in the night.

A boy that’s sweet on my daughter lives here in our neighbourhood and in fact I spotted the silhouette of his almond head in the topmost window that caught a perfect angle of the milky sunrise. She turned to see what had caught my attention and waved, fingers nodding as if they were stroking through water. The brief expression of confusion fleeted faster than his presence in the window, contorting into horror - as if he were afraid that I would break down his door, come upstairs into the room and kill him too.

“Ash is never like that. Did you say something to him?” my younger girl grilled.
“…No.”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t!”

She sighed as she loosely followed me along the empty cobbles. She eventually matched my pace and overtook me as she noticed the bookkeeper’s daughter watering the flowerpots. “Abbie! Good morning!” she called out. She wasn’t listening. In fact, she wasn’t doing anything - completely suspended as the watering pot submerged the reseda in its own muddy ocean. It was only until my daughter took ahold of her wrist that she jolted to attention as if she had been broken from a witches trance. “Lucy?” she asked incredulously. “What are you doing here?”

She outlined the distant hills with her finger before waving it to me. The young lass looked me up and down before Abbie whispered indistinctly into her ear. I held my breath. “Inquisitors? Here?” she answered with an eyebrow raised. They whispered for another few moments before my daughter tugged at my wrist. “Father, something happened near home. We should see if Mother is okay.”

I exhaled. “Good idea…”

We came under more and more scrutiny as the day drew closer to morning-time. Neighbours peering at us from behind glass panes. Hushed gossip between the street knocker-ups and the families they woke. We simply smiled as we finally approached the portico of our quaint home in the corner of our district as the district’s eyes stuck to us.
“Wait.” I whispered. She obeyed.

My fingers tightened around the bundle of flowers in my hand as I slowly approached the door alone. The sound of silverware clattered and I froze myself with a single step to go. “Mother must be in the kitchen already..!” my daughter quietly called out. She reached for the handle but the door had already swung open. The smile on her face slowly faded as the tips of several blades greeted her.

The lily fell onto the pavement and flattened beneath my heel as I reached forward to snatch my daughter in my arms away from the pair of Inquisitors. I assumed the third was responsible for my wife’s howling protest as furniture toppled during her scramble to the front door. “Father?!” my daughter cried as one of the men managed to rip her away from my grasp. His gloved hand covered her mouth as his partner stepped forward.

These men were unknown to my family but I knew them - all of them, very well.
And this would not be the last I would see of them. That I am sure of.

A distant shatter was all I could remember. 

Yet I was torn from what should’ve been my eternal slumber to wander the mortal coil once again.

Blurry, across mountains of my comrades - the stature of a woman.

An enemy who stood for wickedness. One whom I must kill.

Dogged were my senses but I rose from where I fell.

My fingers tickled and eventually wrapped around cold steel.

I took flight, the lack of steel weight carrying me in the wind.

But distant stars collided with the burning horizon.

I felt slow. Weak. The mud beneath me clutched my boots.

Our cries seemed to echo into silence through the ashen air.

The world froze, and I with it.

Distant stars collided with the burning horizon. This is the end.

Our service was done. The ultimate reward was death. 

An eternal reprieve from the struggles and corruption of this accursed land.

The universe released its grasp on us. The anger in her eyes was gone. 

So was the fear, anguish and suffering that contorted her blood-spattered eyebrow.

Though her plated gauntlets still clutched her glinting longsword.

We stood on blood-watered soil not as enemies, but as people.

Loyal soldiers. Casualties on parchment. 

We looked up. We were falling towards the sky. 

Together.

She turned to me, and I to her.

I stared into a single eye, a swirling poison cloud.

I was mesmerised by the beauty behind her acrid, piercing stare.

In the chaos of the battlefield - her helmet was shattered, sitting astray on her skull.

The soldier’s vow in me barked at my conscience. Threatened to rip me limb from limb in the afterlife.

It wouldn’t let me die, knowing that I had broken my code in my final breath.

My free arm twitched. The bones within my fingers cracked as I reached towards her helm.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity.

She flinched, but I was faster.

She gasped, but I was stronger.

I dropped my blade and my steel-clad knuckles wrapped around her crown.

I squeezed. I twisted. Hard.

I looked at her, and her to me.

The sword’s weight slipped through her fingers.

She had unconsciously split the world in two.

There was silence…

…until there was a gentle, reverberating giggle.

She prodded the side of her helmet, now properly fastened to her head.

Now, two clouds seemed to swell behind its metal prison, glitter now sprinkling in its endless pools of acid.

Next, she swung her head wildly. It didn’t budge. Her eyes were perfectly visible, sitting flush within the slit of her visor like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. 

I was expecting to feel a sense of rivening. The hollow twisting of my gut, longing for something fleeting.

After all, I swore fealty to the Queen’s Guardians. 

I serve the true heiress and regent of the Khalverian kingdom.

My orders are to kill those who serve the traitorous princes of the Hand. 

To end their suffering at the hands of the magic that has corrupted their very essence. 

But commands and pledges be damned. Our leaders are not here now. 

Only her and I, standing at the edge of reality as it was swept underneath the rug of existence.

She moved a little closer and raised the gloves to her face, but I gently pressed my hand on her vambrace.

“Don’t you want to see?” she implored, hand on her visor.

I did. I really did. But we didn’t have enough time.

I wish we could’ve had the chance to make proper introductions, but introductions wouldn’t be made regardless. Even if everything was perfect, we would always be each other’s enemy. If not on this battlefield, then the next. 

“I know enough.” I replied, moving my hand onto her own.

Her eyes met mine. As dull as humanity could get. A dark shade between pale, silty soil and rich mud.

Even my armour was lacklustre in comparison to the soldiers of the Hand. Steel plates mounted on steel chains coupled together to sit on leather padding. I blended in with the rest of our numbers.

On the other hand, she seemed to stand proud in her own personal moonbeam. Lustrous silver-coloured plating decorated with golden trimmings that seemed to dazzle, even in the sulfuric smoke that encroached at our feet.

I felt bad. I was nothing that she hadn’t seen before.

My fingers interlocked with hers. The Executor would have my head for fraternisation.

But Father would probably do worse. He used to be a soldier. Loyalty to the crown runs in his veins.

The only hope I had was my sister. We hadn’t spoken since she squeezed my hand and shielded me from my father - the two locked in an endless bout of wailing, crying and screaming. Not since the Fracture that divided the Kingdom’s people in two - not since she had left Father and I to seize the proclaimed “life-changing magical potential” that the Princes had promised to their followers.

I didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to care anymore.

Tendrils of blackened, unstable essence shattered through the pallid soil. 

We stood on our own island, our hole-ridden raft that barely bobbed above the tides of chaos. 

Dark, voidly tongues slammed at the edges of our world, drawing us closer and closer to each other.

We began to sink into the abyss - the stomach of the world.

She fell to the floor, and I fell with her. 

We lied in each other’s gazes as the mountains above us collapsed into boulders that collapsed into meteors. Fiery rain scalded our bare skin and slowly melted our walls.

She cried as a jagged stone struck her. Her eyes vanished as the helmet came loose once more.

The impact warped the front of her visor shut with scorched, bloodstained steel.

“I can’t see..!”

Through the cracks along the side of her helmet, I watched as the faint glimmer of her eyes darted around the blackened confines that surrounded them - encasing them in a steel coffin to be hidden from the world for what should be until her death. 

But they found me again. My familiar, boring eyes.

I could practically feel her heart slow down again. She seemed… satisfied.

Perhaps mundane wasn’t something she had grown tired of, but something that she longed for once more.

The storm stopped, and the darkness surrounded us. 

My throat went dry as ash seemed to encircle us and our crumbling island.

Now, the mist grew angry. The air began to buzz, crackle and snap at our armour.

“It’s okay.” I told her. “I’m still here.”

I looked at her. She looked at me.

I smiled beneath my steel cage.

I couldn’t see her face but somehow I knew she was smiling back.

If time were still relevant, then our time is now.

The earth shook beneath us. 

Then it was midnight.

A definition that
yearns to burn my own
selfish image of me
in fractalline lakes
brimmed and topped in pity.

BREATHE

Passion spontaneous,
a force of unknown
method and making with
no rime or reason
that moves my pen to
plastic works of disillusion
that yearn and froth at chewed rubber
to shatter manifest syllabic
and eviscerate phonemic writ.

GASP

Eyes cut on plastic paper,
is when you know that
the black, red and blue
ink pens are not those
robots, balls and guns
you loved at the start
of perfect conscience.

DROWN

My words and writing hold no
weight on ears futile to stop
and listen to the sound of
a desperate hunger for
understanding in a time
where understanding is a
pleasure relished by
no-one with ears too.

“Creation”

The stars of the night danced above us, a silent audience watching our show. It was a beautiful night.

In all fairness, there wasn’t a single night in the Proxima that wasn’t picturesque. 

While the lands of Proxima flourished and remained in an everlasting golden age, the remaining thirds of Nysencia’s land had succumbed to the rotten plague of transgression. It wasn’t the generals who sent their officers who in turn sent their soldiers that razed kingdoms outside of the Proxima to dust. It was the influence of pure, unadulterated sin. Not only that, but the smirking otherworldly fiends behind the scenes - demons dominating the lesser-minded and sowing chaos as if it were as easy as moving a chess piece across a board.

Our faith in the Ethereans stands tall, and with it - our camaraderie. Our harmony.

“A Devourer’s Lament”

The land here is kind. Tranquil, even. But there is no light without darkness. Even in a land as perfect as the Proxima.

The reclusive population of Wilmarch are death incarnate. They are predators. Vultures. Killers.

Beneath their façade, a sacrilegious sect of sinners who deny the sanctity of the Divine seeds that sowed our soil.

Cannibalistic, flesh-sacrificing slayers that scourge the realm of Nysencia and the Proxima with their rotten stench.

I can’t stand them. And yet… I belong to them.

I am haunted by the effects of their repulsive practices. With a single bite, whether that may be human or beast - I can see the world in new eyes. I can feel what they feel. Understand how they think. The last I dined, I consumed the flesh of a kind, ambitious man who was haunted by an unholy, vehement hunger. He tasted of intoxicating, insatiable fury and a sickly sweet relish of dominion. 

I despised it. Frivolous feasts. Scarlet chalices.

So the Divine Trinity gave me purpose. Become bigger than mortal.

I fled the next day. 

I set out to right the wrongs I had inflicted. 

To return the dreams and nightmares I had stolen. 

The love and hatred that I had subsumed.

And it begins with that cursed, hollowed man.

“SOUL”

“What is it, Cavalentia?” Divello asked.

“To be Empyrean,” I recited in a whisper as I ran my fingertips along the runic stone tablet. Carved in its face, three lines extending out from a centre point. A calligraphic letter was etched within each third. Going clockwise from the top it read: E, R and V. The Divine Trinity. The Ethereans that presided over our lands.

Ethos, the Etherean of Creation. The basis of Nysencia’s light and shadow.

Rosarthia, The Etheress of the Soul. The composer of our creed, good and evil.

Vespasius, the Etherean of Ambition. The artist of our motivation. Our dreams and desires.

Suddenly, the rune shifted. The stars in the sky aligned in a perfect constellation resembling the Trinity’s symbol.

From its tail, a single beam of crackling force struck the webbed throne, basking it in divine light. 

It whispered, “Sit. Become our Empyrean. Protector of Proxima's peace. The guardian of Nysencia.”

I gasped in awe and turned to my companion, but he was not smiling.

My excitement became bewildered terror as he throttled me with plated gloves, slammed my skull into the cobbles beneath our feet and walked towards the light.

“A Hollowed Tragedy”

The horizon started aflame. A feminine voice dominated my thoughts. 

Spectral flames and fireflies swirled around me, forming patterns and assemblages of predestinations and scenes beyond my comprehension.

“Rise quickly my chosen, for there are many like you.

The Ethereal Plane and its guardians bring mandate, with haste. 

The torches of tranquility burn freely in this realm. Ensure the prosperity of Nysencia and its people.

Know this, Gideon Divello, hollowed champion of Kesserfaire.

Become the Empyrean. The light must not go out.”

I opened my eye, and a familiar reality stood before me once again - watching me wither away in silence. The midday sun blazed down on my plate armour, sweat trickling down my malformed cheek and along my scarred jaw. There were no remnants of the vision. Only a command. A holy decree.

But suddenly, I fell to my knees, whimpering and writhing like a sick dog. 

The ocean tides grew with the gust of angry, distant clouds. 

Another voice wrenched the soul from my body but it was louder, intonation dripping with venom. 

From within my accursed being, an urge called. The personification of lust manifested. 

My inseparable partner, the devil Lucetta gently caressed my ear.

“Divinity? 

My dear Gideon, you gamble more than you can afford.

Or perhaps your sweet, innocent mind is finally seeing sense.

I’m sure that rumbling stomach you call a soul is finally thirsty for some power. Some control.

How much of your body can you expect to live without?

The wretched flesheaters that feasted on your limbs, your honour - they could bend to your will.

Become the Empyrean. We can do great things together…”

“AMBITION”

“Divello! Stop!” she shrieked.

Cavalentia’s lean yet muscular frame tensed as her body arched, balanced on the balls of her feet. The silver dagger that had sunk its razor edge into hundreds, maybe thousands, was finally pointed at its next victim. Even her ornate robes and helm seemed poised to end him in a heartbeat if it so desired. Writhing serpents wrapped around her towering, slender shape as they skittered across the rubbled floor and knotted around the golden skewers that protruded around the circumference of her mask.

One could glance over her form and see a predator, ready to drain the blood from your source.

But I was never her enemy. 

Until now.

I stood guard before the Lightspring, a pylon of energy that seemed to stretch up into the cosmos. 

The gate to divinity, lying in wait amidst the ruins of a royal’s abandoned domain. 

The brushed-bronze eyes of her false visage were silently pleading, the tarnished shimmer of her irises reaching out to me to cup my twitching hands. The corners of her lips can’t decide whether they want to morph into her familiar venomous scowl or a contorted, trembling frown that was equal parts anger, terror and sorrow. And worst of all…

She’s crying. I’ve never seen her cry. 

“After all we’ve been through? Is it the power? The control?”

“I’m sorry,” I replied shakily. “But I cannot let you ascend.”

Knives still drawn, she wiped the snot and tears from her face. 

Some part of me yearned to lower my stance, to reach out to her and hold her close.

But my jaw clenched, knuckles white. It ripped the words out of my mouth. And it felt good.

And it would feel better to bring her to her knees. 

To rend the flesh from her bones. 

To take back what was mine.

“The Divine cannot protect our realm. Look past our lands, and what do you see? 

The cost of unfulfilled prayers is too great.  

I will not stand by this, Cavalentia.  I must shoulder the burdens Ethereans could not bear.

But first, you will return what is mine.”

An ear-piercing howl echoed within the decrepit throne room as my arms mangled and crunched to become sharpened obsidian masses. I cried in pain as my femur burst through my thigh, the bones of my arms and legs breaking free from their cage. 

The dark urge within demanded me to flay and graft myself anew.

The mournful countenance playing on her lips was gone. 

No more hoping that I would see reason.

Only horror.