The wind never reaches Veacrutia’s western shelf the way it should.
It breaks instead—splintering across stone ribs that rise like the vertebrae of a dead god, each one carved smooth by centuries of unseen pressure. Below them lies the Gloam Expanse, a basin of pale glass-sand and black water where reflections lag half a second behind their owners. Travelers who cross it swear the land watches them blink.
At the heart of this expanse stands a structure older than cartography.
They call it The Liminal Reliquary*
Once, it was a place of judgment—raised by an extinct priesthood who believed the soul could be measured before death. Now it is something far more dangerous: an entry point.
The book Nagase recovered—its pages stitched from treated bark and spirit-skin—names the Reliquary not as a temple, but as a hinge. A fixed place where Vescrutia presses too closely against the realms in between. Where the Unseen does not merely listen, it speaks back.
The Reliquary is not a tower, nor a gate.
It is a depression in the world.
A vast circular hollow sunk into the stone, its inner walls engraved with spiraling sigils that refuse to stay still. When viewed directly, the carvings resemble prayer. When seen from the corner of the eye, they resemble restraints. At the bottom rests a shallow mirror-pool—perfectly still, perfectly black—fed by no visible source.
This is the Stillwater of Crossing.
No moonlight reflects from it. No stars hover above it. Shadows become motion filled silhouettes of a shadow once familar to a different time—sometimes your own, sometimes not. The book warns that the pool does not open for blood, nor for spellwork alone. It opens for alignment. For those whose intent resonates with the Unseen strongly enough to thin the boundary.
Nagase stands at its edge now, her presence warping the air the way heat does above the sands. Beside her waits another Crown of the Acrix—silent, watchful, aware that stepping through will not be a journey *to* a place, but a surrender of orientation itself.
Because the Unseen is not a realm one enters whole.
It strips context. It unthreads certainty. It answers questions by asking better ones.
When the Stillwater of the Gloame Expanse activates, the sigils along the Reliquary’s invert—turning inward, sealing the basin from the waking world. Sound dies first. Then color. Then memory begins to loosen its grip. Those who cross describe the sensation not as falling, but as being recognized by an unseen force.
What lies beyond is not death.
Not quite spirit.
But the space where meanings are negotiated before they harden into reality.
And Nagase is about to step into it—armed with forbidden knowledge, an incomplete map, and the quiet understanding that the Unseen never gives without taking something in return.
“The boundary is thinning, it recognizes our intent. The crossing…begins.”
Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
-
Inariel Myotis
- Drifter
- Posts: 170
- Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2019 7:57 pm
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
A moonless sky, a starless heaven. Was all that stood above and around the obsidian lake.
A canopy of cascading black akin to falling night. A deluge of dusk, unlike anything he had ever witnessed on the material plane. Only in the blackest reaches of his own soul, the gore of his own abyss. Yet this blackness, which once haunted his every dream, echoing sins of lives long lost, names like crowns now broken, no longer caused him trepidation. If anything, they ushered him forth, the scorn abated with...
Acceptence
Yet despite their likeness in apperence this darkness around them was different. Vast, yet finite, inviting yet stern, discerning, as if lulling a tune few were meant to hear.
Primevil
He stepped from beyond the veiling blackness of the land's shadow. His boldly sanguine hair stood out the most. His face held the faint twinge of itrigue. The earth here, it's naten buzzed around him intrestgly. As if warning him, preparing for something that defied all he knew. But he had to remain steadfast in why they had come here. Beneath the shy whispers of the pale grass lay the strong smell of ambition. As if the realm itself bore an agenda. scouring over anyone who stepped close to the Stillwater. He gazed into its waters, yet found no reflection. Sometimes he wondered if Myotis truly were vampires after all, but glancing over at Nagase's lack of a reflection as well, he coly dimissed the musing.
"This place...it feels like the Moon Flow..."
A pooled bridge to the afterlife that resided in the Maaluki Woods. A place where those trekking upon the last moments of life go to have one last sip of water before passing on. A sanctuary for the souls of the departed and a vestige of remembrance for the living. A site of immense spiritual power coveted by Desires and fiends alike. A realm of which he was the guardian. Perhaps it was their likeness and the fact that the Moonflow coursed through his body like lifeblood that caused him and the Still Waters to push and pull from each other like so.
It...resited him at first, as if scanning his essence, reading and questioning his intent.
"It...hesitates for me."
His bond with the natural world was only newly restored. It served to reason that some of her most intimate sanctum may still be hard for him to access... reservations about his presence. The last time...he....Allen wounded her with his chaos.
It was a silent assurance, a negotiation before ever getting a chance to sit at the table. Assurance that his company would not be the reason the world suffered.
"Let's not linger then."
He said outloud to Nagase before stepping through the inverted sigils ahead of her.
The Stillwaters' prior hesitation ultimately receded as Inari bore in mind their purpose, his anchor. Sound left him first. The thrum of the earth, the faint whistle of wind, the beat of his own heart—all were silenced by an all-encompassing caesura. Had he not been able to feel the ghost of a pulse in his chest, he would have denied its existence. Then color bled from the world, the stark crimson of his hair and the deep shades of the land dissolving into a uniform, featureless grey.
Then memory began to loosen its grip.
Faces became blurred watercolors, names became shapes without meaning, and the long chain of his past became a series of disconnected sensations. He was not forgetting; he was being unmoored from the narrative he had built around himself. It was a terrifying, exhilarating dissolution. Perception shattered, the self was undone, removed, and remade again. Newly forged, yet unchanged. What awaited them on the otherside of this jounery he was sure, would place them in a position to defy the fate of a world ruined.
A canopy of cascading black akin to falling night. A deluge of dusk, unlike anything he had ever witnessed on the material plane. Only in the blackest reaches of his own soul, the gore of his own abyss. Yet this blackness, which once haunted his every dream, echoing sins of lives long lost, names like crowns now broken, no longer caused him trepidation. If anything, they ushered him forth, the scorn abated with...
Acceptence
Yet despite their likeness in apperence this darkness around them was different. Vast, yet finite, inviting yet stern, discerning, as if lulling a tune few were meant to hear.
Primevil
He stepped from beyond the veiling blackness of the land's shadow. His boldly sanguine hair stood out the most. His face held the faint twinge of itrigue. The earth here, it's naten buzzed around him intrestgly. As if warning him, preparing for something that defied all he knew. But he had to remain steadfast in why they had come here. Beneath the shy whispers of the pale grass lay the strong smell of ambition. As if the realm itself bore an agenda. scouring over anyone who stepped close to the Stillwater. He gazed into its waters, yet found no reflection. Sometimes he wondered if Myotis truly were vampires after all, but glancing over at Nagase's lack of a reflection as well, he coly dimissed the musing.
"This place...it feels like the Moon Flow..."
A pooled bridge to the afterlife that resided in the Maaluki Woods. A place where those trekking upon the last moments of life go to have one last sip of water before passing on. A sanctuary for the souls of the departed and a vestige of remembrance for the living. A site of immense spiritual power coveted by Desires and fiends alike. A realm of which he was the guardian. Perhaps it was their likeness and the fact that the Moonflow coursed through his body like lifeblood that caused him and the Still Waters to push and pull from each other like so.
It...resited him at first, as if scanning his essence, reading and questioning his intent.
"It...hesitates for me."
His bond with the natural world was only newly restored. It served to reason that some of her most intimate sanctum may still be hard for him to access... reservations about his presence. The last time...he....Allen wounded her with his chaos.
It was a silent assurance, a negotiation before ever getting a chance to sit at the table. Assurance that his company would not be the reason the world suffered.
"Let's not linger then."
He said outloud to Nagase before stepping through the inverted sigils ahead of her.
The Stillwaters' prior hesitation ultimately receded as Inari bore in mind their purpose, his anchor. Sound left him first. The thrum of the earth, the faint whistle of wind, the beat of his own heart—all were silenced by an all-encompassing caesura. Had he not been able to feel the ghost of a pulse in his chest, he would have denied its existence. Then color bled from the world, the stark crimson of his hair and the deep shades of the land dissolving into a uniform, featureless grey.
Then memory began to loosen its grip.
Faces became blurred watercolors, names became shapes without meaning, and the long chain of his past became a series of disconnected sensations. He was not forgetting; he was being unmoored from the narrative he had built around himself. It was a terrifying, exhilarating dissolution. Perception shattered, the self was undone, removed, and remade again. Newly forged, yet unchanged. What awaited them on the otherside of this jounery he was sure, would place them in a position to defy the fate of a world ruined.
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
The crossing of realms came with a price.
And that price was pain refined into knowledge.
Pain did not vanish between the realms—it was curated, rendered down until only its utility remained. Every fragment stripped away became something sharper, something that cut deeper because it understood more.
Nagase felt it begin the instant the Liminal Reliquary accepted her and Inariel.
There was no splash. No ripple. No moment of entry that could be named now. Meaning itself loosened its grip first—definitions unthreading, truths softening like wax held too close to flame. What she had once known as fixed and inviolate bent inward, pliable, reshaping under pressures she could not see.
It felt like falling.
Not the clean fall of gravity, but a plummeting without direction—faster and faster toward an ending she could sense but could not alter. The Unseen did not rush her. It allowed acceleration. It allowed inevitability.
Color bled into geometry. Geometry dissolved into intent. The universal constants she had relied on—distance, causality, sequence—were no longer laws but suggestions, kneaded and reformed by an unseen hand. Principles became clay. Clay became breath.
And still she fell.
There were moments—brief, treacherous moments—where she knew she would land on her feet. Where the world aligned just long enough to promise survival. Then others, just as certain, where she knew she would strike something unyielding and die. Not metaphorically. Truly. Endings stacked atop endings, each equally valid, each awaiting selection.
It was refreshing.
And it was terrifying.
Time, impossibly, existed here—if only as a pressure. It had no direction, no flow, yet she felt its tug like a tide against her spine. Solid. Defining. Order masquerading as restraint. She clung to it instinctively, desperately, as one might cling to a cord dropped from a retreating aircraft.
The sensation was agony.
Holding onto time here was like gripping a fishing line while descending at light speed through a void. It burned. It flayed. It ruined. Each fraction of resistance carved understanding directly into her being, bypassing thought entirely.
What choice did she have?
She was lost. Out of her element. And perhaps—she acknowledged it without shame—unprepared.
Fear followed.
Not as a thought. Not as a spiral of doubt. Her mind had been abandoned long before the crossing of the Still Waters. This fear took root deeper—in the architecture of her existence. Worry without language. Dread without image.
The Unseen pressed closer.
Not hostile. Not welcoming. Merely attentive.
Nagase felt the infinite mechanics of the crossing begin to paralyze her—not through force, but through wonder. Endless systems unfolding, collapsing, recombining faster than comprehension could chase. She and Inari were becoming observers, pinned by awe, reduced to reflections drifting through an immeasurable calculus.
No.
She would not fall like this.
She would not be reduced to a variable.
“Merkabah!”
The word tore itself from her without hesitation—triumphant, defiant, alive. Sound returned to her voice even as sound itself refused to exist. She clasped her hands together, and reality responded.
Triangles bloomed into formation across her arms, burning into place with surgical precision. They spread over her militant uniform, interlocking, rotating, asserting geometry where geometry had been denied. Not decoration. Not symbolism.
Structure.
She refused to leave herself to chance. Refused to descend endlessly through a temporal chasm of shoreless computation, waiting for the Unseen to decide what she would become. This was what Crowns of the Acrix were forged for, Order.
She fought.
The seals of Merkabah released—not explosively, but
decisively. Experience crystallized into form. Memory became mass. Will gained edges. The falling slowed—not because gravity returned, but because Nagase imposed resistance and resistance became structure.
No longer would she and Inari be forced to simply witness the infinite machinations of realm-crossing. No longer would they be paralyzed by the beauty of systems too vast to name.
The descent did not stop.
But it answered her.
The Unseen reshaped around the declaration—not in submission, but in acknowledgment. The pain sharpened, deepened, refined further, converting itself into understanding that could be wielded. Loss completed its transformation into gain.
She emerged aligned. The realm inbetween became stable.
And that price was pain refined into knowledge.
Pain did not vanish between the realms—it was curated, rendered down until only its utility remained. Every fragment stripped away became something sharper, something that cut deeper because it understood more.
Nagase felt it begin the instant the Liminal Reliquary accepted her and Inariel.
There was no splash. No ripple. No moment of entry that could be named now. Meaning itself loosened its grip first—definitions unthreading, truths softening like wax held too close to flame. What she had once known as fixed and inviolate bent inward, pliable, reshaping under pressures she could not see.
It felt like falling.
Not the clean fall of gravity, but a plummeting without direction—faster and faster toward an ending she could sense but could not alter. The Unseen did not rush her. It allowed acceleration. It allowed inevitability.
Color bled into geometry. Geometry dissolved into intent. The universal constants she had relied on—distance, causality, sequence—were no longer laws but suggestions, kneaded and reformed by an unseen hand. Principles became clay. Clay became breath.
And still she fell.
There were moments—brief, treacherous moments—where she knew she would land on her feet. Where the world aligned just long enough to promise survival. Then others, just as certain, where she knew she would strike something unyielding and die. Not metaphorically. Truly. Endings stacked atop endings, each equally valid, each awaiting selection.
It was refreshing.
And it was terrifying.
Time, impossibly, existed here—if only as a pressure. It had no direction, no flow, yet she felt its tug like a tide against her spine. Solid. Defining. Order masquerading as restraint. She clung to it instinctively, desperately, as one might cling to a cord dropped from a retreating aircraft.
The sensation was agony.
Holding onto time here was like gripping a fishing line while descending at light speed through a void. It burned. It flayed. It ruined. Each fraction of resistance carved understanding directly into her being, bypassing thought entirely.
What choice did she have?
She was lost. Out of her element. And perhaps—she acknowledged it without shame—unprepared.
Fear followed.
Not as a thought. Not as a spiral of doubt. Her mind had been abandoned long before the crossing of the Still Waters. This fear took root deeper—in the architecture of her existence. Worry without language. Dread without image.
The Unseen pressed closer.
Not hostile. Not welcoming. Merely attentive.
Nagase felt the infinite mechanics of the crossing begin to paralyze her—not through force, but through wonder. Endless systems unfolding, collapsing, recombining faster than comprehension could chase. She and Inari were becoming observers, pinned by awe, reduced to reflections drifting through an immeasurable calculus.
No.
She would not fall like this.
She would not be reduced to a variable.
“Merkabah!”
The word tore itself from her without hesitation—triumphant, defiant, alive. Sound returned to her voice even as sound itself refused to exist. She clasped her hands together, and reality responded.
Triangles bloomed into formation across her arms, burning into place with surgical precision. They spread over her militant uniform, interlocking, rotating, asserting geometry where geometry had been denied. Not decoration. Not symbolism.
Structure.
She refused to leave herself to chance. Refused to descend endlessly through a temporal chasm of shoreless computation, waiting for the Unseen to decide what she would become. This was what Crowns of the Acrix were forged for, Order.
She fought.
The seals of Merkabah released—not explosively, but
decisively. Experience crystallized into form. Memory became mass. Will gained edges. The falling slowed—not because gravity returned, but because Nagase imposed resistance and resistance became structure.
No longer would she and Inari be forced to simply witness the infinite machinations of realm-crossing. No longer would they be paralyzed by the beauty of systems too vast to name.
The descent did not stop.
But it answered her.
The Unseen reshaped around the declaration—not in submission, but in acknowledgment. The pain sharpened, deepened, refined further, converting itself into understanding that could be wielded. Loss completed its transformation into gain.
She emerged aligned. The realm inbetween became stable.
-
Inariel Myotis
- Drifter
- Posts: 170
- Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2019 7:57 pm
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
The toll of crossing the divide was less like a drop into the unknown and more like a hurdle through infinity.
A weightless collapse, but not of the world around him.
But within.
A scalding stripping of synapse into synoposis. Inariel felt his consciousness unraveling, the neat spools of memory and identity fraying into raw, vibrant strands. Things clearly defined—left and right, up and down, realm and fake—became little more than suggestion, theories of how something could exist rather than a definition of what is or even what once was. He witnessed his sense of self fracture, bleeding into the ever-expanding yet infinitely folding expanse around him. The thinning of these once consecrated notions of anchoring to reality crumbled like dried clay. Determination became wind, fleeting, unable to be held; thought transmuted into structure but bent, unreliable, and spinning.
The only thing that proved to be constant was the dissolution of comfort. The price of pain, undiluted, ravaged his being, a torrent of inescapable torment that felt like the tearing of scabs close to healing yet never quite becoming so. His eyes shut tight, but this agony began to distill into presence.
But not singular.
Quite the contrary.
When Inariel next opened his eyes, he was no longer in the stainless realm of shifting greys and blinking shades. He was in a realm of deep ruby, wading in an ocean of endless vermillion. Crimson currents pulsed like slow arterial blood, thick and vital. The air, if it could be called air, tasted of iron and salt.
He knew it instantly.
Akai Kizu.
The Red Wound.
His Soul space.
Only this time, it was not a place he entered. It had ruptured outward. The Unseen, in its merciless excavation of self and soul, had torn open the vessel that contained his inner world, spilling its essence like spilt blood onto snow. It stained the unseen in deep cardinal. Strokes of darker claret, like old sinew braided through flesh, began to coalesce. Shapes swam beneath the surface — amorphous at first, then horrifyingly clear.
Bodies.
Hundreds filled the wallowing, sanguine waters like a drowned battlefield. Male and female forms, all bearing sparkling green eyes, all bearing manes of crimson locs. His eyes widened. Their expressions were mangled, horror etched into their faces as if sculpted by fear itself. Limbs twisted into an obtuse manner and impossible structure. Spears through the guts, blades embedded in backs, claws tearing the jugular from throats.
It was a mirror of his many incarnations. Those whose agony and pain he carried within him to this day. Though form may change, the darkness of those prior journeys had clung to him like a wasp to honey. Each was a life designed for torture. Each clamoring for that which was stolen from them, stolen from him.
Each was willing to sacrifice everything and anything to obtain that which they yearned for most…
Only to be granted nothing but death and betrayal instead.
The scars of the trauma, though the flesh eventually renews and resets… the blood never forgets. Carrying the torture of the previous life into the next, another ethereal link in the chain of cursed ether that once bound them all.
Inariel was confounded by this at first; their screams, each a haunted echo of a lifetime of being hunted and tormented by the Red Eye’s diabolical pursuit of his soul. But he… he had conquered this darkness. He had stood against the Red Eye. He had broken its curse. He earned the right to speak of healing, of recognition, of growth. He wore his progress like armor, believing that forward motion equaled recovery. But here, in this non-space where lies dissolved, and shadows spoke, he saw the truth.
Performing healing, decorating spent developments as growth, recognition, and acceptance, when in truth he had only taken the first step upon the journey towards healing. Fooling himself into thinking that by always moving forward, the lane towards an ameliorated life was linear.
But here, beyond the Liminal Reliquary, everything was anything but linear. It was a smorgasbord of mirrors big and small, reflections bearing something foreign, obscuring recognition of the familiar. Only showing that which we tend to flee from.
This pain continued to sharpen, and with each laceration of his certainty of who and what he was, another thread of truth threaded into the needle of understanding. Although it was a feeling that was less of Inariel understanding more of himself, but rather the act of observing his will, piecing together the things his ego wished to turn from.
The Unseen showed him the things he shied away from seeing. Forcing him to acknowledge the fact beneath the facade.
The Red Eye had not created the suffering — it had cultivated it. Like a parasite feeding on rot, it had found the emotional ignorance, the rage, the fear, the selfishness of his past incarnations — and weaponized them. It did not create monsters in him. It revealed the ones already there.
These bodies — these drowned, broken versions of himself — were not phantoms.
They were memories. They were not figments.
They were real.
Each scream echoed not just pain, but abandonment. Abandonment by himself — by the version of Inariel who moved forward, who declared healing, who spoke of growth while locking the past in a cellar of denial. He had not honored their deaths. He had disguised them as stepping stones. Without any true know-how on what was needed to mend. To turn that agony into purpose...into evolution.
So he continued to sink
Every second stretched into an eternity. The red waters closed over him, thick as blood, suffocating. He was drowning not in liquid, but in the accumulated despair of a thousand dead selves. The weight was unbearable — not of sin, but of responsibility. Responsibility to remember.
To grieve.
To witness.
A weight insurmountable for him.
It was exactly this that made his Animus, the weapon born of his soul, his mana given physical form, impossible for him to wield even now.
The sanguine waters pressed against him, a crushing weight that felt less like water and more like liquid lead. He tried to push them away, to shield himself with the lies he had told himself for so long—that he was healed, that he was strong, that the darkness was a relic of the past.
But the Unseen knew better. The Red Wound knew the truth.
He was afraid. Scared that he would revert back into something unthinkable…unknowing.
The vermillion abyss began to swirl, a vortex of pain pulling him deeper into the core of his own trauma. The faces of his past selves loomed closer, their green eyes locking onto his, filled with a silent, accusing plea.
Inariel’s chest tightened, the air stolen from his lungs by the sheer pressure of their collective sorrow. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. The red waters turned black, thick and tar-like, clinging to his skin, seeping into his pores. This was it. This was the consequence of his denial. By refusing to acknowledge the depth of the wound, he had allowed it to fester, to become this all-consuming ocean.
He was sinking into the abyss of his own making.
Just as the darkness threatened to consume his consciousness entirely, a flicker of light pierced through the crimson gloom.
It wasn't a memory of battle or survival. It wasn't a vision of power or triumph.
It was a memory of quiet faith.
He saw a face—distinct from the sea of green-eyed specters. A hand resting gently on his shoulder, a voice steady and calm amidst his past turmoil. "You don't have to carry it all at once, Inariel."
Hyomyn
A friend turned demon, but a friend before all else.
Another memory surfaced. A humanoid shape within a blinding golden light. The feature couldn't be described, but the warm invitation of the gold wafting from it, like the earth of a well-loved home, was unmistakable
The ego that had shouted, "I have conquered this!" was finally silenced by the whisper of truth: "I am still hurting."
And that was okay.
It was ok to hurt....it was ok to be hurting still.
Strength did not mean being unbreakable, unmaliable.
It meant being able to persevere despite being bent,
Though that realization didn't erase the pain. Though it didn't banish the screaming echoes of his past aches. It did, however, allow him to see those wounds through a new lens. He stopped fighting the current. He stopped trying to hold his breath against the crushing pressure.
He allowed himself to feel the weight.
Echoes of love. Of faith. Of people who had seen the darkness in him — really seen it — and stayed.
And in that moment, Inariel wept.
Not in sorrow.
In surrender.
He did not need to pretend. He did not need to wear healing like a mask. He didn't need control. He did not have to be whole to be worthy. With this, a shift occurred. The suffocating weight of the Red Wound didn't vanish, but it transformed. The inky blackness of the tar-like water began to thin. The aggressive vermillion softened, bleeding into a gentle, dazzling red, like an immolated sun of ruby.
The screams of his past lives quieted, fading into a distant hum—the sound of a memory acknowledged, rather than a wound ignored.
The sanguine waters, once a prison of his own despair, began to dissolve into countless points of light. The ocean of blood became a canopy of "stars" forged from the wept tears.
Inariel stopped sinking.
He floated, drifting in the vast, silent expanse of the "cosmos". He was still within the Unseen, but his will began to bring semblance. The stars weren't distant, cold entities; they were pieces of his soul, his history, his trauma, and his hope, all glowing in the dark, beautiful in their complexity.
He took a breath—a deep, shuddering breath that tasted of possibility. Not fear of the unknown...but anticipation, fervor.
The destination no longer mattered; he would end up exactly where he needed to be. He wason the right path, however tangled, however jarring. It was his
It...had always been his.
A weightless collapse, but not of the world around him.
But within.
A scalding stripping of synapse into synoposis. Inariel felt his consciousness unraveling, the neat spools of memory and identity fraying into raw, vibrant strands. Things clearly defined—left and right, up and down, realm and fake—became little more than suggestion, theories of how something could exist rather than a definition of what is or even what once was. He witnessed his sense of self fracture, bleeding into the ever-expanding yet infinitely folding expanse around him. The thinning of these once consecrated notions of anchoring to reality crumbled like dried clay. Determination became wind, fleeting, unable to be held; thought transmuted into structure but bent, unreliable, and spinning.
The only thing that proved to be constant was the dissolution of comfort. The price of pain, undiluted, ravaged his being, a torrent of inescapable torment that felt like the tearing of scabs close to healing yet never quite becoming so. His eyes shut tight, but this agony began to distill into presence.
But not singular.
Quite the contrary.
When Inariel next opened his eyes, he was no longer in the stainless realm of shifting greys and blinking shades. He was in a realm of deep ruby, wading in an ocean of endless vermillion. Crimson currents pulsed like slow arterial blood, thick and vital. The air, if it could be called air, tasted of iron and salt.
He knew it instantly.
Akai Kizu.
The Red Wound.
His Soul space.
Only this time, it was not a place he entered. It had ruptured outward. The Unseen, in its merciless excavation of self and soul, had torn open the vessel that contained his inner world, spilling its essence like spilt blood onto snow. It stained the unseen in deep cardinal. Strokes of darker claret, like old sinew braided through flesh, began to coalesce. Shapes swam beneath the surface — amorphous at first, then horrifyingly clear.
Bodies.
Hundreds filled the wallowing, sanguine waters like a drowned battlefield. Male and female forms, all bearing sparkling green eyes, all bearing manes of crimson locs. His eyes widened. Their expressions were mangled, horror etched into their faces as if sculpted by fear itself. Limbs twisted into an obtuse manner and impossible structure. Spears through the guts, blades embedded in backs, claws tearing the jugular from throats.
It was a mirror of his many incarnations. Those whose agony and pain he carried within him to this day. Though form may change, the darkness of those prior journeys had clung to him like a wasp to honey. Each was a life designed for torture. Each clamoring for that which was stolen from them, stolen from him.
Each was willing to sacrifice everything and anything to obtain that which they yearned for most…
Only to be granted nothing but death and betrayal instead.
The scars of the trauma, though the flesh eventually renews and resets… the blood never forgets. Carrying the torture of the previous life into the next, another ethereal link in the chain of cursed ether that once bound them all.
Inariel was confounded by this at first; their screams, each a haunted echo of a lifetime of being hunted and tormented by the Red Eye’s diabolical pursuit of his soul. But he… he had conquered this darkness. He had stood against the Red Eye. He had broken its curse. He earned the right to speak of healing, of recognition, of growth. He wore his progress like armor, believing that forward motion equaled recovery. But here, in this non-space where lies dissolved, and shadows spoke, he saw the truth.
Performing healing, decorating spent developments as growth, recognition, and acceptance, when in truth he had only taken the first step upon the journey towards healing. Fooling himself into thinking that by always moving forward, the lane towards an ameliorated life was linear.
But here, beyond the Liminal Reliquary, everything was anything but linear. It was a smorgasbord of mirrors big and small, reflections bearing something foreign, obscuring recognition of the familiar. Only showing that which we tend to flee from.
This pain continued to sharpen, and with each laceration of his certainty of who and what he was, another thread of truth threaded into the needle of understanding. Although it was a feeling that was less of Inariel understanding more of himself, but rather the act of observing his will, piecing together the things his ego wished to turn from.
The Unseen showed him the things he shied away from seeing. Forcing him to acknowledge the fact beneath the facade.
The Red Eye had not created the suffering — it had cultivated it. Like a parasite feeding on rot, it had found the emotional ignorance, the rage, the fear, the selfishness of his past incarnations — and weaponized them. It did not create monsters in him. It revealed the ones already there.
These bodies — these drowned, broken versions of himself — were not phantoms.
They were memories. They were not figments.
They were real.
Each scream echoed not just pain, but abandonment. Abandonment by himself — by the version of Inariel who moved forward, who declared healing, who spoke of growth while locking the past in a cellar of denial. He had not honored their deaths. He had disguised them as stepping stones. Without any true know-how on what was needed to mend. To turn that agony into purpose...into evolution.
So he continued to sink
Every second stretched into an eternity. The red waters closed over him, thick as blood, suffocating. He was drowning not in liquid, but in the accumulated despair of a thousand dead selves. The weight was unbearable — not of sin, but of responsibility. Responsibility to remember.
To grieve.
To witness.
A weight insurmountable for him.
It was exactly this that made his Animus, the weapon born of his soul, his mana given physical form, impossible for him to wield even now.
The sanguine waters pressed against him, a crushing weight that felt less like water and more like liquid lead. He tried to push them away, to shield himself with the lies he had told himself for so long—that he was healed, that he was strong, that the darkness was a relic of the past.
But the Unseen knew better. The Red Wound knew the truth.
He was afraid. Scared that he would revert back into something unthinkable…unknowing.
The vermillion abyss began to swirl, a vortex of pain pulling him deeper into the core of his own trauma. The faces of his past selves loomed closer, their green eyes locking onto his, filled with a silent, accusing plea.
Inariel’s chest tightened, the air stolen from his lungs by the sheer pressure of their collective sorrow. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. The red waters turned black, thick and tar-like, clinging to his skin, seeping into his pores. This was it. This was the consequence of his denial. By refusing to acknowledge the depth of the wound, he had allowed it to fester, to become this all-consuming ocean.
He was sinking into the abyss of his own making.
Just as the darkness threatened to consume his consciousness entirely, a flicker of light pierced through the crimson gloom.
It wasn't a memory of battle or survival. It wasn't a vision of power or triumph.
It was a memory of quiet faith.
He saw a face—distinct from the sea of green-eyed specters. A hand resting gently on his shoulder, a voice steady and calm amidst his past turmoil. "You don't have to carry it all at once, Inariel."
Hyomyn
A friend turned demon, but a friend before all else.
Another memory surfaced. A humanoid shape within a blinding golden light. The feature couldn't be described, but the warm invitation of the gold wafting from it, like the earth of a well-loved home, was unmistakable
Aurelius..."You are more than pain, than torment. Those are things you've suffered, not what makes up all of what you are."
These were anchors. Not anchors to a false sense of security, but to a truth he had minimized. He had been so focused on projecting an image of the healed warrior, the one who had overcome the Red Eye, that he had forgotten the true cost of the journey. He had to be reminded that healing wasn't a destination to be reached, but a path to be walked."Do you know the secret of the moon? On its own, the Moon has no light. It only shines...because the sun is so brilliant. Together, they sing a song of cosmic accordance. When the sun needed to rest, the moon continued its work. It is a primordial performance that will continue to dance and sing long after you and I are but afterthoughts of fables lost in the winds. Though your body might have been cursed by darkness... your soul...that seed. Is the life-giving rays of the sun itself."
The ego that had shouted, "I have conquered this!" was finally silenced by the whisper of truth: "I am still hurting."
And that was okay.
It was ok to hurt....it was ok to be hurting still.
Strength did not mean being unbreakable, unmaliable.
It meant being able to persevere despite being bent,
Though that realization didn't erase the pain. Though it didn't banish the screaming echoes of his past aches. It did, however, allow him to see those wounds through a new lens. He stopped fighting the current. He stopped trying to hold his breath against the crushing pressure.
He allowed himself to feel the weight.
Echoes of love. Of faith. Of people who had seen the darkness in him — really seen it — and stayed.
And in that moment, Inariel wept.
Not in sorrow.
In surrender.
He did not need to pretend. He did not need to wear healing like a mask. He didn't need control. He did not have to be whole to be worthy. With this, a shift occurred. The suffocating weight of the Red Wound didn't vanish, but it transformed. The inky blackness of the tar-like water began to thin. The aggressive vermillion softened, bleeding into a gentle, dazzling red, like an immolated sun of ruby.
The screams of his past lives quieted, fading into a distant hum—the sound of a memory acknowledged, rather than a wound ignored.
The sanguine waters, once a prison of his own despair, began to dissolve into countless points of light. The ocean of blood became a canopy of "stars" forged from the wept tears.
Inariel stopped sinking.
He floated, drifting in the vast, silent expanse of the "cosmos". He was still within the Unseen, but his will began to bring semblance. The stars weren't distant, cold entities; they were pieces of his soul, his history, his trauma, and his hope, all glowing in the dark, beautiful in their complexity.
He took a breath—a deep, shuddering breath that tasted of possibility. Not fear of the unknown...but anticipation, fervor.
The destination no longer mattered; he would end up exactly where he needed to be. He wason the right path, however tangled, however jarring. It was his
It...had always been his.
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
Nagase didn’t need to look at him to know.
The Unseen carried Inariel’s wound openly—no modesty, no restraint. It leaked outward in vermillion threads, staining the liminal fabric between them. Pain here wasn’t private. It was communicable. Resonant. She felt it brush against her like heat from a forge: the drowning weight, the chorus of dead selves, the slow, terrible honesty of grief finally allowed to speak.
She saw the bodies.
Not as visions—more like awareness. A string of them, trailing him endlessly, each one tugging at his spine. Each one asking to be acknowledged. The Red Wound pulsed, and with it came the ache of responsibility he carried like penance.
Nagase snorted.
“Oh, Inariel,” she said, voice easy, almost amused. “My wittle Alli’-poo.” She glanced sideways, eyes half-lidded, casual in a way that bordered on cruel. “You’re so serious. Honestly? It reminds me of someone…”
A soft laugh escaped her—short, dismissive. As if pain were an old joke she’d heard too many times to respect anymore.
Then something *shifted*.
Not in him.
In her.
The Unseen didn’t challenge her words. It simply followed them to their source.
The amusement evaporated.
Emotion slammed into Nagase without warning—no ramp, no mercy. It hit her like a gravity well snapping into existence. Her breath caught hard in her chest. The laugh died mid-echo, her posture faltering as something ancient and unwanted tore through the armor she hadn’t realized was still there.
“...Azazel.”
Not the name—the feeling.
Warmth. Uncomplicated. Human.
The Unseen opened like a wound she’d cauterized long ago and never looked back at. Childhood spilled out: sunlit days with scraped knees and stolen food, Azazel’s grin too wide, too alive. The sound of laughter echoing down narrow streets. Her mother’s hands—gentle, grounding, real—pulling her close without asking for strength in return.
Safety.
Love without cost.
Nagase staggered, eyes unfocused.
This was what she had burned.
This was what invulnerability demanded.
She had wanted to be untouchable. Unbreakable. An island—self-contained, impervious, sovereign. And in doing so, she had severed the very thing Inariel was now drowning in and daring to face.
She’d mocked it.
Mocked him for it. Mocked her father. Mocked Azazel—right up until the day warmth became weakness and weakness became unacceptable.
For a long moment, Nagase said nothing.
She stood there, lost in a place she never allowed herself to be—inside memory, inside feeling. An experience she derided as inefficiency. As indulgence. As failure.
The irony didn’t escape her.
The Unseen held her gently, almost respectfully, as if acknowledging that this—this pause—was rarer for her than pain ever was for Inariel.
Then the space changed.
Gold bled into the void—not blinding, not invasive, but organizing. Structure blossomed outward, as if reality itself straightened its spine. Stone formed beneath their feet. Distance learned how to behave. Voices emerged—not loud, but present. Countless. Alive.
A city revealed itself where liminality had been. Nagase lifted her head as the familiar presence resolved beside them—radiant, composed, inevitable.
“You…”
His light was warmth without demand. Order without chains. The Unseen did not recoil from him; it coalesced, Streets took shape. Towers rose. Kinship replaced isolation. Meaning returned—not rigid, but shared.
He regarded them both, eyes kind and knowing.
“Welcome to Akasha.”
And for once—just once—Nagase didn’t have a joke ready.
She only breathed.
The Unseen carried Inariel’s wound openly—no modesty, no restraint. It leaked outward in vermillion threads, staining the liminal fabric between them. Pain here wasn’t private. It was communicable. Resonant. She felt it brush against her like heat from a forge: the drowning weight, the chorus of dead selves, the slow, terrible honesty of grief finally allowed to speak.
She saw the bodies.
Not as visions—more like awareness. A string of them, trailing him endlessly, each one tugging at his spine. Each one asking to be acknowledged. The Red Wound pulsed, and with it came the ache of responsibility he carried like penance.
Nagase snorted.
“Oh, Inariel,” she said, voice easy, almost amused. “My wittle Alli’-poo.” She glanced sideways, eyes half-lidded, casual in a way that bordered on cruel. “You’re so serious. Honestly? It reminds me of someone…”
A soft laugh escaped her—short, dismissive. As if pain were an old joke she’d heard too many times to respect anymore.
Then something *shifted*.
Not in him.
In her.
The Unseen didn’t challenge her words. It simply followed them to their source.
The amusement evaporated.
Emotion slammed into Nagase without warning—no ramp, no mercy. It hit her like a gravity well snapping into existence. Her breath caught hard in her chest. The laugh died mid-echo, her posture faltering as something ancient and unwanted tore through the armor she hadn’t realized was still there.
“...Azazel.”
Not the name—the feeling.
Warmth. Uncomplicated. Human.
The Unseen opened like a wound she’d cauterized long ago and never looked back at. Childhood spilled out: sunlit days with scraped knees and stolen food, Azazel’s grin too wide, too alive. The sound of laughter echoing down narrow streets. Her mother’s hands—gentle, grounding, real—pulling her close without asking for strength in return.
Safety.
Love without cost.
Nagase staggered, eyes unfocused.
This was what she had burned.
This was what invulnerability demanded.
She had wanted to be untouchable. Unbreakable. An island—self-contained, impervious, sovereign. And in doing so, she had severed the very thing Inariel was now drowning in and daring to face.
She’d mocked it.
Mocked him for it. Mocked her father. Mocked Azazel—right up until the day warmth became weakness and weakness became unacceptable.
For a long moment, Nagase said nothing.
She stood there, lost in a place she never allowed herself to be—inside memory, inside feeling. An experience she derided as inefficiency. As indulgence. As failure.
The irony didn’t escape her.
The Unseen held her gently, almost respectfully, as if acknowledging that this—this pause—was rarer for her than pain ever was for Inariel.
Then the space changed.
Gold bled into the void—not blinding, not invasive, but organizing. Structure blossomed outward, as if reality itself straightened its spine. Stone formed beneath their feet. Distance learned how to behave. Voices emerged—not loud, but present. Countless. Alive.
A city revealed itself where liminality had been. Nagase lifted her head as the familiar presence resolved beside them—radiant, composed, inevitable.
“You…”
His light was warmth without demand. Order without chains. The Unseen did not recoil from him; it coalesced, Streets took shape. Towers rose. Kinship replaced isolation. Meaning returned—not rigid, but shared.
He regarded them both, eyes kind and knowing.
“Welcome to Akasha.”
And for once—just once—Nagase didn’t have a joke ready.
She only breathed.
-
Inariel Myotis
- Drifter
- Posts: 170
- Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2019 7:57 pm
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
Nagase’s laughter, sharp and unapologetic, sliced through the swirling non-reality of the Unseen.
“Still clinging to your precious introspection, Inari? One would think a creature of your… vintage… would have outgrown navel-gazing.”
Her voice, a finely honed blade of sarcasm, sought its mark, a familiar dance of verbal parrying that had become their grim, comforting rhythm within this shifting plane. If anything remained stagnant and consistent here, it was Nagase's insistent need for petulance. It was as if she needed it, needed it to anchor herself against the encroaching chaos, a desperate, defiant declaration of self in a realm that threatened to erase all definition.
Inari, his vulpine eyes narrowed, prepared a retort – a barb as biting as her own, perhaps – but the words died on his tongue. Just as he looked to her, poised to return the volley, the Unseen moved. Not with a roar or a tremor, but with a subtle, insidious grace. It snatched at Nagase’s essence, the invisible roots of her clamouring need for comic relief, tracing it back to its very source. A sudden, disorienting pull, like an invisible hand plucking a thread from deep within her soul, unravelled her carefully constructed facade.
Her usual flippancy vanished, replaced by a momentary, stark vulnerability. Her own shadows, which she had so meticulously woven into this chasm of avoidance, now writhed before her, exposed. She’d wished to bury, escape, dismiss those things that stung her soul like scorpions. But that venom refused to be ignored here. The Unseen was like the pen of an artist, directing narratives no matter how well hidden. It was the scalpel of a surgeon, cutting into the flesh of one's psyche and revealing the root of the rot they wished to shrink.
Nagase, stripped bare of her customary wit, stood frozen, her gaze distant, lost in a landscape of self-inflicted wounds. Inari watched, a silent observer to a cosmic dissection. What the Unseen filleted from her barriers, however, was not what truly set him and Nagase apart. But rather, the things that unified them, the raw, aching truths that made their unlikely bond even more plausible and solid: the price they had paid for power, the countless things they had burned to become what they were, the truth of what they regretted, the legitimacy of their laments.
Nagase had once seen her family, perhaps even the very notion of it, as a hindrance, a vulnerability that left her exposed, mortal. In her quest for omnipotence, she had cut from her the cloth of all that bound her to Vescrutia—her desires to be loved, to not just be viewed or observed by her father, but to truly be seen. Yet to be observed was to be perceived, to be sifted through, analyzed, and made tangible… harmable. And so, she poked, prodded, and joked her way through the pain of wanting to belong but choosing to differentiate, to rise above. She, too, like Inariel, had grafted her mask from the desire to be impervious, a wall unbreachable, a tower unscalable.
In his observance of her wound, a chasm of loneliness and self-sacrifice, Inari could not hold back his soul from syncing with her, if only for a moment. He felt the cold, hard ambition that had fueled her decisions, the searing agony of severing ties, the quiet despair of perpetual isolation. A question, born from this profound empathy, escaped his lips, barely a whisper in the echoing void: “Was it worth it?”
Yet time, this infinite well of fates, yet fully determined, left room for growth even still. It wasn't too late. Inari, after eons of wishing to remain unseen, to be a ghost in the cosmic machinations, had chosen to be viewed. For him, the journey was only just beginning—to gaze upon his own imperfections and to find the congruence between himself and others. He was… relearning unity.
And it terrified him. He didn’t wish to lose anyone else, anything else again. These reasons became the thread that helped him to reknit the places from which the ruby of his soul seeped. From this newfound resolve, his decision to embrace connection rather than retreat, the realm of the Unseen, once shifting endlessly, began to solidify, to become defined.
Mending came in the form of a gilden glare. The brilliant radiance of an aureate moon gently grasped the lawlessness of the realms, absent definition, and imposed order. The oscillating geometry came to a standstill, forging walkways where only the void once was. As reality became defined by the glamour of this golden light, Inariel’s eyes slowly trailed from Nagase, still lost in her memories, to the source of their nigh divine gossamer.
What his eyes settled upon was the visage of something he dared not hope to believe. The agony of that reality might just break him all over again. For the hearth of this light was the very foundation of the pyre that had fueled his ambitions, the searing philosophy of what it meant to sacrifice oneself to ensure the torch could be passed. Inari’s breath hitched, tightly coiled in his throat.
“A… Au…”
Emotion overcame him, a deluge of grief that redefined him all over again. His eyes became clouded by thick tears, refusing to fall, held captive by the sheer impossibility of what he witnessed. Slowly, he lifted himself, his heart hammering against his ribs, his eyes, slitted fox-like orbs of lime green, shimmered with disbelief. It couldn’t have been him, but he knew the Unseen could not replace falsehood. His twin moon...
“Still clinging to your precious introspection, Inari? One would think a creature of your… vintage… would have outgrown navel-gazing.”
Her voice, a finely honed blade of sarcasm, sought its mark, a familiar dance of verbal parrying that had become their grim, comforting rhythm within this shifting plane. If anything remained stagnant and consistent here, it was Nagase's insistent need for petulance. It was as if she needed it, needed it to anchor herself against the encroaching chaos, a desperate, defiant declaration of self in a realm that threatened to erase all definition.
Inari, his vulpine eyes narrowed, prepared a retort – a barb as biting as her own, perhaps – but the words died on his tongue. Just as he looked to her, poised to return the volley, the Unseen moved. Not with a roar or a tremor, but with a subtle, insidious grace. It snatched at Nagase’s essence, the invisible roots of her clamouring need for comic relief, tracing it back to its very source. A sudden, disorienting pull, like an invisible hand plucking a thread from deep within her soul, unravelled her carefully constructed facade.
Her usual flippancy vanished, replaced by a momentary, stark vulnerability. Her own shadows, which she had so meticulously woven into this chasm of avoidance, now writhed before her, exposed. She’d wished to bury, escape, dismiss those things that stung her soul like scorpions. But that venom refused to be ignored here. The Unseen was like the pen of an artist, directing narratives no matter how well hidden. It was the scalpel of a surgeon, cutting into the flesh of one's psyche and revealing the root of the rot they wished to shrink.
Nagase, stripped bare of her customary wit, stood frozen, her gaze distant, lost in a landscape of self-inflicted wounds. Inari watched, a silent observer to a cosmic dissection. What the Unseen filleted from her barriers, however, was not what truly set him and Nagase apart. But rather, the things that unified them, the raw, aching truths that made their unlikely bond even more plausible and solid: the price they had paid for power, the countless things they had burned to become what they were, the truth of what they regretted, the legitimacy of their laments.
Nagase had once seen her family, perhaps even the very notion of it, as a hindrance, a vulnerability that left her exposed, mortal. In her quest for omnipotence, she had cut from her the cloth of all that bound her to Vescrutia—her desires to be loved, to not just be viewed or observed by her father, but to truly be seen. Yet to be observed was to be perceived, to be sifted through, analyzed, and made tangible… harmable. And so, she poked, prodded, and joked her way through the pain of wanting to belong but choosing to differentiate, to rise above. She, too, like Inariel, had grafted her mask from the desire to be impervious, a wall unbreachable, a tower unscalable.
In his observance of her wound, a chasm of loneliness and self-sacrifice, Inari could not hold back his soul from syncing with her, if only for a moment. He felt the cold, hard ambition that had fueled her decisions, the searing agony of severing ties, the quiet despair of perpetual isolation. A question, born from this profound empathy, escaped his lips, barely a whisper in the echoing void: “Was it worth it?”
Yet time, this infinite well of fates, yet fully determined, left room for growth even still. It wasn't too late. Inari, after eons of wishing to remain unseen, to be a ghost in the cosmic machinations, had chosen to be viewed. For him, the journey was only just beginning—to gaze upon his own imperfections and to find the congruence between himself and others. He was… relearning unity.
And it terrified him. He didn’t wish to lose anyone else, anything else again. These reasons became the thread that helped him to reknit the places from which the ruby of his soul seeped. From this newfound resolve, his decision to embrace connection rather than retreat, the realm of the Unseen, once shifting endlessly, began to solidify, to become defined.
Mending came in the form of a gilden glare. The brilliant radiance of an aureate moon gently grasped the lawlessness of the realms, absent definition, and imposed order. The oscillating geometry came to a standstill, forging walkways where only the void once was. As reality became defined by the glamour of this golden light, Inariel’s eyes slowly trailed from Nagase, still lost in her memories, to the source of their nigh divine gossamer.
What his eyes settled upon was the visage of something he dared not hope to believe. The agony of that reality might just break him all over again. For the hearth of this light was the very foundation of the pyre that had fueled his ambitions, the searing philosophy of what it meant to sacrifice oneself to ensure the torch could be passed. Inari’s breath hitched, tightly coiled in his throat.
“A… Au…”
Emotion overcame him, a deluge of grief that redefined him all over again. His eyes became clouded by thick tears, refusing to fall, held captive by the sheer impossibility of what he witnessed. Slowly, he lifted himself, his heart hammering against his ribs, his eyes, slitted fox-like orbs of lime green, shimmered with disbelief. It couldn’t have been him, but he knew the Unseen could not replace falsehood. His twin moon...
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
Nagase didn’t answer at first.
Silence was… unusual for her.
She stood within Akasha’s forming streets as if caught between steps, gaze unfocused, jaw set—not guarded, not defiant, just still. The city breathed around them: distant voices, the echo of footfalls that belonged to no one nearby, light refracting off architecture that felt remembered rather than built. It was too warm. Too gentle.
Reflection pressed in.
Not regret—she didn’t indulge in that—but accounting. A ledger of choices stripped of justification. Power gained. Warmth abandoned. Invincibility purchased with absence. For the first time in longer than she cared to admit, she didn’t immediately reach for irony or teeth.
Aurelius waited.
He did not rush her. Akasha itself seemed to follow his lead—patient, allowing silence to exist without trying to fill it.
Finally, Nagase spoke.
Her voice was quieter than usual. Not weak. Just… unarmed.
“Aren’t you dead?”
She looked directly at him now, eyes sharp again, but the edge had dulled. “I watched you die. I felt it. So explain to me how you’re standing here like nothing ended.”
Aurelius smiled—not sadly, not smugly. The smile of someone who had once asked the same question and survived the answer.
“And aren’t you,” he replied gently, “alive?”
He gestured—not accusing, merely inclusive—at the city, the Unseen folded into form, the impossible stillness they occupied. “Yet here you are. Outside breath. Outside pulse. Outside sequence.”
Nagase stiffened.
The words slipped past her defenses because they weren’t aimed to wound.
“How are you here?” Aurelius continued, voice calm as sunrise. “How is either of you?”
She felt it then—the way Akasha leaned in, not to listen, but to resonate. The question echoed through the stone beneath their feet, through the golden lattice of light overhead, through the lingering vermillion threads still woven into the air.
Nagase exhaled slowly.
“…So life and death,” she said, almost to herself, “are just labels.”
Aurelius inclined his head. “Convenient ones. Useful in narrow contexts. But ultimately…”
“Illusions,” she finished quietly.
“Yes,” Aurelius said. “Narratives we tell ourselves to impose comfort on continuity.”
He stepped forward, and with each step the city clarified—markets resolving in the distance, figures pausing mid-conversation, a sense of belonging threading through the space like connective tissue.
“There is no true beginning,” Aurelius went on, “and no final ending. There is only existence—experiencing itself through different states of awareness.” His gaze moved between them. “Birth is not arrival. Death is not departure. They are transitions in perspective.”
Nagase let out a short breath that might’ve been a laugh, might’ve been something else.
“So all that struggle,” she said. “All that fear of ending. Of losing. Of being erased.”
“Is the fear of discontinuity,” Aurelius said. “Not nonexistence.”
Something in Nagase’s expression tightened—not pain, but recognition.
She had chased power to outrun death. To become something that could not be taken. Something final. Absolute.
And all along, there had been no finish line to cross.
“…Figures,” she muttered. “I burned half my life trying to kill a ghost.”
Aurelius’s smile softened. “You burned it trying to control what cannot be owned.”
Akasha’s light pulsed—not brighter, just deeper.
Nagase looked around the city, then back at Aurelius. “So this place,” he asked, “isn’t an afterlife.”
“No,” Aurelius replied. “Nor a before. Nor a between, as mortals like to frame it.”
He spread his hands, and the city answered—voices rising, distant bells chiming, warmth settling into their bones.
“This is a convergence. A place for those within existence whom have remembered itself.”
Nagase swallowed.
For once, she didn’t crack a joke.
“…And us?” she asked. “What are we, then?”
Aurelius met her gaze—truly met it.
“Still becoming,” he said.
Akasha breathed around them.
Silence was… unusual for her.
She stood within Akasha’s forming streets as if caught between steps, gaze unfocused, jaw set—not guarded, not defiant, just still. The city breathed around them: distant voices, the echo of footfalls that belonged to no one nearby, light refracting off architecture that felt remembered rather than built. It was too warm. Too gentle.
Reflection pressed in.
Not regret—she didn’t indulge in that—but accounting. A ledger of choices stripped of justification. Power gained. Warmth abandoned. Invincibility purchased with absence. For the first time in longer than she cared to admit, she didn’t immediately reach for irony or teeth.
Aurelius waited.
He did not rush her. Akasha itself seemed to follow his lead—patient, allowing silence to exist without trying to fill it.
Finally, Nagase spoke.
Her voice was quieter than usual. Not weak. Just… unarmed.
“Aren’t you dead?”
She looked directly at him now, eyes sharp again, but the edge had dulled. “I watched you die. I felt it. So explain to me how you’re standing here like nothing ended.”
Aurelius smiled—not sadly, not smugly. The smile of someone who had once asked the same question and survived the answer.
“And aren’t you,” he replied gently, “alive?”
He gestured—not accusing, merely inclusive—at the city, the Unseen folded into form, the impossible stillness they occupied. “Yet here you are. Outside breath. Outside pulse. Outside sequence.”
Nagase stiffened.
The words slipped past her defenses because they weren’t aimed to wound.
“How are you here?” Aurelius continued, voice calm as sunrise. “How is either of you?”
She felt it then—the way Akasha leaned in, not to listen, but to resonate. The question echoed through the stone beneath their feet, through the golden lattice of light overhead, through the lingering vermillion threads still woven into the air.
Nagase exhaled slowly.
“…So life and death,” she said, almost to herself, “are just labels.”
Aurelius inclined his head. “Convenient ones. Useful in narrow contexts. But ultimately…”
“Illusions,” she finished quietly.
“Yes,” Aurelius said. “Narratives we tell ourselves to impose comfort on continuity.”
He stepped forward, and with each step the city clarified—markets resolving in the distance, figures pausing mid-conversation, a sense of belonging threading through the space like connective tissue.
“There is no true beginning,” Aurelius went on, “and no final ending. There is only existence—experiencing itself through different states of awareness.” His gaze moved between them. “Birth is not arrival. Death is not departure. They are transitions in perspective.”
Nagase let out a short breath that might’ve been a laugh, might’ve been something else.
“So all that struggle,” she said. “All that fear of ending. Of losing. Of being erased.”
“Is the fear of discontinuity,” Aurelius said. “Not nonexistence.”
Something in Nagase’s expression tightened—not pain, but recognition.
She had chased power to outrun death. To become something that could not be taken. Something final. Absolute.
And all along, there had been no finish line to cross.
“…Figures,” she muttered. “I burned half my life trying to kill a ghost.”
Aurelius’s smile softened. “You burned it trying to control what cannot be owned.”
Akasha’s light pulsed—not brighter, just deeper.
Nagase looked around the city, then back at Aurelius. “So this place,” he asked, “isn’t an afterlife.”
“No,” Aurelius replied. “Nor a before. Nor a between, as mortals like to frame it.”
He spread his hands, and the city answered—voices rising, distant bells chiming, warmth settling into their bones.
“This is a convergence. A place for those within existence whom have remembered itself.”
Nagase swallowed.
For once, she didn’t crack a joke.
“…And us?” she asked. “What are we, then?”
Aurelius met her gaze—truly met it.
“Still becoming,” he said.
Akasha breathed around them.
-
Inariel Myotis
- Drifter
- Posts: 170
- Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2019 7:57 pm
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
The name "Akasha" hummed in the air like a prayer, a resonance that wrapped around Inari’s being as the world around him crystallized from the formless gold of the Unseen. Streets of radiant stone wove beneath his feet, towers of impossible architecture stretched skyward, and the distant murmur of voices—real, alive—filled his ears.
Yet, none of it mattered.
His lime-green eyes, vulpine and sharp, locked onto the figure standing ahead—the one who had haunted his thoughts since the moment his light had faded.
Aurelius.
His twin moon. His other half. The name curled on his tongue like a sacred whisper, soft enough to be lost beneath the city’s forming symphony. But the tremors it sent through Akasha’s foundations betrayed its weight.
Inari’s wings—black as the void, furred at the edges—twitched against his back, the only sign of his unrest. Inside him, emotions warred: the dizzying thrill of seeing Aurelius again, the crushing guilt of the sacrifice that had torn them apart, and beneath it all, a slow-dawning unease.
Because Aurelius looked at him—knew him—and yet…
His gaze was wrong.
It lacked the warmth Inari remembered, the silent understanding that had once passed between them with a glance. Instead, Aurelius regarded him with a detached curiosity, as if observing a stranger who had wandered into his realm.
Had death altered him? Had the Unseen stolen their memories? No. Inari’s myotian instincts flared; Aurelius knew him, recognized him—but something had shifted.
Swallowing the questions clawing at his throat, Inari forced himself to speak.
"It is nature’s purest reflection..." he murmured, the words spilling instead of the confession he longed to make. The truth of the Seed of Creation, the burden he carried, surged beneath his ribs. He had always understood existence differently—life and death were not endings but transformations, cycles of naten returning to its source. The demand that came with his unique blood magic was rooted in this truth.
But Akasha was something else. A convergence. A place where memory and existence intertwined.
Aurelius tilted his head, his expression unreadable. "Energy or matter can never truly be destroyed," Inari continued, his voice steadier now, though his heart remained unanchored. "When the physical is reduced, it returns to its purest form... This city... it is a basin of that essence."
The world around them pulsed as though acknowledging his words, the distant chime of bells echoing like a heartbeat.
Aurelus inquired
Time. A cruel jest.
Inari’s claws pressed faint crescents into his palms. As if observing his own internal question. What hadn’t he done? He had wandered the fractures of the Unseen, endured the torment of the Red Wound, relived every moment of their last battle—Antares’ laughter, the crumbling of Acrix, and the way his face had twisted in grief as Aurelius's light scattered into the void. So many things he wants to tell his moon. They journey into the past, the fight against the Red Eyes: Minratha's resurrection, the rise of the Myotian guardians of the Veil.
And now, standing here, bathed in the golden light of Akasha, all Inari wanted was to reach out. To feel Aurelius’ warmth again, to press his forehead to his twin’s and let their breaths sync as they once had.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he smiled—small, bittersweet. "Searching...." he admitted.
Aurelius frowned slightly, as though the answer puzzled him. As though he didn’t remember the promises they’d whispered in the dark, the vows carved into their very souls.
A distant voice interrupted—Nagase’s, sharp and inquisitive—and Aurelius turned away, dismissing Inari as casually as one would a passing shadow.
The ache in Inari’s chest flared, hot and jagged.
Akasha was a place of convergence, of belonging.
So why did he feel more lost than ever?
And why did Aurelius look at him as if he were a ghost?
Yet, none of it mattered.
His lime-green eyes, vulpine and sharp, locked onto the figure standing ahead—the one who had haunted his thoughts since the moment his light had faded.
Aurelius.
His twin moon. His other half. The name curled on his tongue like a sacred whisper, soft enough to be lost beneath the city’s forming symphony. But the tremors it sent through Akasha’s foundations betrayed its weight.
Inari’s wings—black as the void, furred at the edges—twitched against his back, the only sign of his unrest. Inside him, emotions warred: the dizzying thrill of seeing Aurelius again, the crushing guilt of the sacrifice that had torn them apart, and beneath it all, a slow-dawning unease.
Because Aurelius looked at him—knew him—and yet…
His gaze was wrong.
It lacked the warmth Inari remembered, the silent understanding that had once passed between them with a glance. Instead, Aurelius regarded him with a detached curiosity, as if observing a stranger who had wandered into his realm.
Had death altered him? Had the Unseen stolen their memories? No. Inari’s myotian instincts flared; Aurelius knew him, recognized him—but something had shifted.
Swallowing the questions clawing at his throat, Inari forced himself to speak.
"It is nature’s purest reflection..." he murmured, the words spilling instead of the confession he longed to make. The truth of the Seed of Creation, the burden he carried, surged beneath his ribs. He had always understood existence differently—life and death were not endings but transformations, cycles of naten returning to its source. The demand that came with his unique blood magic was rooted in this truth.
But Akasha was something else. A convergence. A place where memory and existence intertwined.
Aurelius tilted his head, his expression unreadable. "Energy or matter can never truly be destroyed," Inari continued, his voice steadier now, though his heart remained unanchored. "When the physical is reduced, it returns to its purest form... This city... it is a basin of that essence."
The world around them pulsed as though acknowledging his words, the distant chime of bells echoing like a heartbeat.
"What had he been doing all this time?"“How are you here?” Aurelius continued, voice calm as sunrise. “How is either of you?”
Aurelus inquired
Time. A cruel jest.
Inari’s claws pressed faint crescents into his palms. As if observing his own internal question. What hadn’t he done? He had wandered the fractures of the Unseen, endured the torment of the Red Wound, relived every moment of their last battle—Antares’ laughter, the crumbling of Acrix, and the way his face had twisted in grief as Aurelius's light scattered into the void. So many things he wants to tell his moon. They journey into the past, the fight against the Red Eyes: Minratha's resurrection, the rise of the Myotian guardians of the Veil.
And now, standing here, bathed in the golden light of Akasha, all Inari wanted was to reach out. To feel Aurelius’ warmth again, to press his forehead to his twin’s and let their breaths sync as they once had.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he smiled—small, bittersweet. "Searching...." he admitted.
Aurelius frowned slightly, as though the answer puzzled him. As though he didn’t remember the promises they’d whispered in the dark, the vows carved into their very souls.
A distant voice interrupted—Nagase’s, sharp and inquisitive—and Aurelius turned away, dismissing Inari as casually as one would a passing shadow.
The ache in Inari’s chest flared, hot and jagged.
Akasha was a place of convergence, of belonging.
So why did he feel more lost than ever?
And why did Aurelius look at him as if he were a ghost?
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
The ache did not go unnoticed.
Aurelius had turned away from Inari too quickly. Too cleanly. As if conversation were a garment he could remove at will.
But Akasha betrayed him.
The golden streets hummed—not with architecture, but with tension. A subtle distortion in the air between twin moons. Resonance interrupted.
Inari’s pain did not scream like the Red Wound.
It pulled.
A tether stretched too tight.
Aurelius stilled.
For a moment, the radiant composure slipped—not visibly to the city, not to Nagase—but to himself. The warmth he emanated felt procedural. A function. A light without heat.
He exhaled.
“Inari.”
The name was different now. Not distant. Not detached.
Weighted.
Golden light shifted as he stepped closer—not imposing, not overwhelming. Simply nearer.
“You look at me,” Aurelius began, voice quieter than before. “i have missed you.”
Inari’s wings twitched again. His silence answered more honestly than words ever could.
Aurelius’ gaze softened—but it carried exhaustion beneath it. Not physical. Existential.
“You thought,” Aurelius admitted, eyes sharp but unsteady, “that if I ever saw you again… you would be—” He faltered. “Overwhelmed. Relieved. Angry. Something.”
A humorless breath left Aurelius.
“I was,” he said. “For a long time.”
The city dimmed slightly—not in light, but in tempo. As though Akasha itself leaned in to listen.
“When I arrived here,” Aurelius continued, “I felt everything at once. Grief. Rage. Loss. The rupture of our bond tearing through me like a second death.” His eyes drifted—not away from Inari, but inward. “I wanted answers. I wanted Antares. I wanted to understand what became of him… and if I could find him.”
Nagase’s gaze rolled at the name.
“Yes,” Aurelius said quietly. “I searched for him.”
There was no shame in it. Only fact.
“I wanted to see what remained. To measure the damage. To know whether pain had changed him.” A pause. “And if it hadn’t… I wanted to be the one to change that.”
The admission hung between them.
“But Antares was not here,” Aurelius went on. “Not in the ways I expected. So I searched deeper. Past the fractures of the Unseen. Past the corridors of soul-debris and unfinished echoes.”
His golden aura flickered—not dimmer, but older.
“And my search led me here. To Akasha.”
He gestured around them—not at the city’s beauty, but at its bones.
“This is not an afterlife,” he said. “Nor a sanctuary constructed by gods.”
Nagase’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“It is an ossuary.”
Silence.
“The ancestral remains of the Makaian.”
The name rolled through Akasha like a distant bell.
“They existed before the Nine Kings. Before the Hellgates formed their clan. Before the Acrix Desert was home.” Aurelius’ voice deepened—not theatrically, but with gravity. “They did not move through the world as you do now. They did not dominate resonance—they harmonized with it. They did not hoard power within the body—they diffused it through spirit and soil alike.”
Visions shimmered faintly in the golden air—figures moving like living chords of light, breath synchronized with wind and root and tectonic pulse.
“They understood existence not as conquest,” Aurelius said, “but as participation.”
Inari listened, but his gaze never left Aurelius’ face.
“You feel distant,” Inari said softly. Not accusation. Observation.
Aurelius closed his eyes briefly.
“I am distant,” he admitted.
The confession did not fracture him. It clarified him.
“When I began to learn what Akasha truly was—what it is—my emotions stretched thin. Linear time...feelings stopped making sense. Grief, love, anger… they are narrow currents. Here, everything flows at once.”
He opened his eyes again, and for the first time since their arrival, warmth—not just radiance—flickered there.
“I feel cold even to myself,” he said.
“I have been searching so long,” Aurelius continued, “for causes. For origins. For the roots beneath the chaos. Before the Alps of Chaos rose. Before the Acrix Desert was carved from collapse. Before the Mortal Descent reshaped our clan.”
His gaze drifted outward, and Akasha responded.
The city’s golden structures thinned into something older—vast plains of resonance, luminous forests that sang when wind passed through them, oceans that shimmered not with reflection but with memory.
“There was a time,” Aurelius said, “when the world did not fracture itself into dominion and defense. When power was not measured in bloodlines or conquest. When the Makaian walked freely between spirit and matter—not as invaders of the Unseen, but as extensions of it.”
Nagase folded her arms—but she was listening.
“The Hellgates move now with discipline and body,” Aurelius continued. “Strength refined. Will hardened. But once… once there was a race who moved as resonance itself.”
He looked back to Inari.
“And when they vanished, they did not disappear.”
The golden city brightened—not aggressively, but knowingly.
“They became this.”
Akasha pulsed—an immense, quiet heartbeat.
“Their remains are not bones,” Aurelius said. “They are memory. Infrastructure. A convergence of ancestral will that refuses erasure.”
Nagase’s breath steadied.
“And you found this,” she murmured.
“No,” Aurelius corrected gently. “It found me.”
A silence followed—not empty, but full.
Then, finally, Aurelius stepped fully into Inari’s space. Close enough that the air between them warmed.
“I have not ignored you,” he said, voice no longer distant. “I have been… stretched. Searching beyond emotion, beyond revenge, beyond even reunion.”
His golden hand lifted—not touching yet, but near.
“But I feel you,” he added quietly. “Always.”
The city hummed in agreement.
Twin moons suspended in a sky that no longer obeyed death.
And somewhere beneath Akasha’s radiant foundations, the ancient resonance of the Makaian stirred.
Aurelius had turned away from Inari too quickly. Too cleanly. As if conversation were a garment he could remove at will.
But Akasha betrayed him.
The golden streets hummed—not with architecture, but with tension. A subtle distortion in the air between twin moons. Resonance interrupted.
Inari’s pain did not scream like the Red Wound.
It pulled.
A tether stretched too tight.
Aurelius stilled.
For a moment, the radiant composure slipped—not visibly to the city, not to Nagase—but to himself. The warmth he emanated felt procedural. A function. A light without heat.
He exhaled.
“Inari.”
The name was different now. Not distant. Not detached.
Weighted.
Golden light shifted as he stepped closer—not imposing, not overwhelming. Simply nearer.
“You look at me,” Aurelius began, voice quieter than before. “i have missed you.”
Inari’s wings twitched again. His silence answered more honestly than words ever could.
Aurelius’ gaze softened—but it carried exhaustion beneath it. Not physical. Existential.
“You thought,” Aurelius admitted, eyes sharp but unsteady, “that if I ever saw you again… you would be—” He faltered. “Overwhelmed. Relieved. Angry. Something.”
A humorless breath left Aurelius.
“I was,” he said. “For a long time.”
The city dimmed slightly—not in light, but in tempo. As though Akasha itself leaned in to listen.
“When I arrived here,” Aurelius continued, “I felt everything at once. Grief. Rage. Loss. The rupture of our bond tearing through me like a second death.” His eyes drifted—not away from Inari, but inward. “I wanted answers. I wanted Antares. I wanted to understand what became of him… and if I could find him.”
Nagase’s gaze rolled at the name.
“Yes,” Aurelius said quietly. “I searched for him.”
There was no shame in it. Only fact.
“I wanted to see what remained. To measure the damage. To know whether pain had changed him.” A pause. “And if it hadn’t… I wanted to be the one to change that.”
The admission hung between them.
“But Antares was not here,” Aurelius went on. “Not in the ways I expected. So I searched deeper. Past the fractures of the Unseen. Past the corridors of soul-debris and unfinished echoes.”
His golden aura flickered—not dimmer, but older.
“And my search led me here. To Akasha.”
He gestured around them—not at the city’s beauty, but at its bones.
“This is not an afterlife,” he said. “Nor a sanctuary constructed by gods.”
Nagase’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“It is an ossuary.”
Silence.
“The ancestral remains of the Makaian.”
The name rolled through Akasha like a distant bell.
“They existed before the Nine Kings. Before the Hellgates formed their clan. Before the Acrix Desert was home.” Aurelius’ voice deepened—not theatrically, but with gravity. “They did not move through the world as you do now. They did not dominate resonance—they harmonized with it. They did not hoard power within the body—they diffused it through spirit and soil alike.”
Visions shimmered faintly in the golden air—figures moving like living chords of light, breath synchronized with wind and root and tectonic pulse.
“They understood existence not as conquest,” Aurelius said, “but as participation.”
Inari listened, but his gaze never left Aurelius’ face.
“You feel distant,” Inari said softly. Not accusation. Observation.
Aurelius closed his eyes briefly.
“I am distant,” he admitted.
The confession did not fracture him. It clarified him.
“When I began to learn what Akasha truly was—what it is—my emotions stretched thin. Linear time...feelings stopped making sense. Grief, love, anger… they are narrow currents. Here, everything flows at once.”
He opened his eyes again, and for the first time since their arrival, warmth—not just radiance—flickered there.
“I feel cold even to myself,” he said.
“I have been searching so long,” Aurelius continued, “for causes. For origins. For the roots beneath the chaos. Before the Alps of Chaos rose. Before the Acrix Desert was carved from collapse. Before the Mortal Descent reshaped our clan.”
His gaze drifted outward, and Akasha responded.
The city’s golden structures thinned into something older—vast plains of resonance, luminous forests that sang when wind passed through them, oceans that shimmered not with reflection but with memory.
“There was a time,” Aurelius said, “when the world did not fracture itself into dominion and defense. When power was not measured in bloodlines or conquest. When the Makaian walked freely between spirit and matter—not as invaders of the Unseen, but as extensions of it.”
Nagase folded her arms—but she was listening.
“The Hellgates move now with discipline and body,” Aurelius continued. “Strength refined. Will hardened. But once… once there was a race who moved as resonance itself.”
He looked back to Inari.
“And when they vanished, they did not disappear.”
The golden city brightened—not aggressively, but knowingly.
“They became this.”
Akasha pulsed—an immense, quiet heartbeat.
“Their remains are not bones,” Aurelius said. “They are memory. Infrastructure. A convergence of ancestral will that refuses erasure.”
Nagase’s breath steadied.
“And you found this,” she murmured.
“No,” Aurelius corrected gently. “It found me.”
A silence followed—not empty, but full.
Then, finally, Aurelius stepped fully into Inari’s space. Close enough that the air between them warmed.
“I have not ignored you,” he said, voice no longer distant. “I have been… stretched. Searching beyond emotion, beyond revenge, beyond even reunion.”
His golden hand lifted—not touching yet, but near.
“But I feel you,” he added quietly. “Always.”
The city hummed in agreement.
Twin moons suspended in a sky that no longer obeyed death.
And somewhere beneath Akasha’s radiant foundations, the ancient resonance of the Makaian stirred.
-
Inariel Myotis
- Drifter
- Posts: 170
- Joined: Mon Jan 21, 2019 7:57 pm
Re: Liminal Reliquary :Crossing The Great Divide
Aurelius’s voice was not a sound; it was a texture. It was the petrichor of morning dew on a grove of midnight orchids, a sensation that coiled around Inari’s senses and pulled them into near obedience. He became captivated, a honey bee drawn to a blossom that could either nourish or destroy him. His ancient nature flared, a primal response to the scent of something beyond divinity, a fresh blood of the spirit. He tried to steel himself, to raise the citadels of solitude he had spent lifetimes perfecting, but Aurelius’s light permeated him with little resistance. It was a dawn that asked permission of no night.“Inari…”
He could hide nothing from him. And after Aurelius’s claim of missing him, a confession that echoed with the weight of eons, he stopped trying to.
It was true. When his twin moon had given his life—his physical form—to thwart the Betrayer’s cataclysmic plans for the Acrix, a part of Inari had shattered. He, who had known incalculable loss, once thought himself calcified of its impact, had been filled with a maelstrom of emotions he thought himself incapable of feeling. After a lifetime of solitude, after coveting the bonds and connections of mortals and immortals alike from a cold distance, he had finally found something worth standing beside. Worth… becoming vulnerable for.
To the outside world, their bond made little sense. What was a handful of moments, a few shared battles, against the backdrop of their immortal existence? How could two such beings meld souls in such a profound way?
But they were fools who saw only the ticking of a clock. Time was a construct, a cage built to bind a simpler reality. Their true communion had happened outside of it. Within the sacred, silent space created when one Myotis indulges in the blood of another, they had spent eons together. In that intimate exchange, every nook of Aurelius’s essence had been observed first, then savored, and vice versa. Aurelius had swum in the darkest reaches of Inari’s abyss, had felt the cold void of his loneliness and the simmering rage of his purpose. And having seen it all—the sanguine savagery that lived within him—Aurelius had still chosen to herald the light Inari was still desperately grasping for.
They were two celestial bodies in an eternal dance of ordained accordance. Aurelius shone with the mystical, benevolent grace of a Kirin; Inari ebbed with the potent, destructive beauty of Bako.
Twin Moons indeed.
“I… have been searching as well,”. Inari’s voice was a low thrum, a vibration harmonizing with the energy of Akasha. “For me. For what it means to bear this crown of crimson. To lead the Myotis. To rekindle that which sparks connection between the nine tribes, not as separate houses, but as a single heart. Something you showed me was possible...”
He spoke as Aurelius drew close. So close that in this realm of spirit and memory, Inari could feel the warmth of his breath, a phantom sensation as real as if they stood in flesh beside one another. The proximity was an anchor in the swirling ocean of the past.
“Beyond revenge,” Inari whispered, the words a confession he had never given voice to. “Gods, how it has burned within me… within us. It was the fuel for our every step. And yet, when I witness Akasha, as I stand here next to Nagase… to you. I can only think of that which binds us in unison. Not what seeks to tear us apart.”
He let the silence hang for a moment, heavy with the weight of his next words. “I mourned you, Aurelius. Your departure left… scars that were too deep to reach. A grief that I did not think I would be able to recover from. It was a cold I had never known, colder than the deepest chasm between stars.”
“But in navigating a life with you not by my side,” he continued, a new strength ironing into his tone, “I resolved to carry on. Your will… our will.”
Inari’s form, a coalescence of shadow and intent, leaned forward. “There was a time, Aurelius, when I asked you to follow me upon this path. Even if it led us into an abyss without light… and you followed. Without hesitation. Prepared for war with the world if needed. Even at the cost of your flesh and blood.”
Their foreheads met. It was not a physical touch, but a confluence of souls. A silent acknowledgement of that sacred, terrible promise and its fulfillment.
“Now I beckon you, my moon, to follow me once more.” Inari’s voice was a compelling current, flowing directly into the core of Aurelius’s being. “Through the darkness that the Horsemen have begun to spread across Vescrutia. I am sure you have felt it… a cold sickness at the edge of perception. It is why we have come. The Betrayer’s work did not end with your sacrifice; it merely evolved.”
Inari pulled back slightly, though their connection remained, a taut, luminous cord between them. His gaze swept around the immense expanse.
“This place… Akasha is more than a tomb,” he said, awe softening his usually sharp features. “It is a giant amalgam of inherited mastery. It hums like that, Sanctum Crystals...I can feel it's ebbing, pulling at my CORE. Knowledge, life, death, experience, trial, triumph, failure, and success… all spread into a living ecosystem of memory. This...was what we felt when we utilized Soul Beat against Antares.”
As he spoke, his senses, heightened to a preternatural peak, delved deeper into the fabric of the chamber. He felt the pulsating presence of the Myotis of the past, their essences humming, not just as individual tribes—the fierce Vesta, the cunning Urizen, the serene Ahkkia—but as a single, magnificent root system of connection that stretched far beyond the names that separated them. And deeper still, underlying it all, an older, more profound power. He felt the lingering spiritual force of the Makaians themselves, not as ghosts, but as a permanent, resonant imprint on reality itself.
His eyes, pools of reflective crimson, widened. The air around them seemed to grow warmer, charged with a latent potential that made the very particles of light dance.
“Nagase…” Inari breathed, the revelation striking him with the force of a physical blow. “This is...mana. Pure, undiluted, primordial mana. The Makaians didn’t just record their lives… they stored the very energy of their civilization. They left us not just a map, but the fuel for the journey.”
The Twin Moons stood together in the heart of the world’s memory, on the precipice of an abyss, submerged in a light thought forever lost. The path ahead was darker than ever, yet Inari felt not the cold grip of despair, but the fierce, warm glow of hope.
It was...nauseating, but welcomed.
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