Chapter 27: Jor-El
Iskander
How many eternities had bled into one another in this damned volcano? This Crucible? Time had become a melted thing, a river of fire and pain with no banks, no beginning and no end.
I'd started to mark its passage by the rhythm of my own destruction and reconstruction, a grotesque metronome counting out the beats of my suffering. The memories of the world outside—of real air, of real faces—felt like fragments from a dream, or someone else's life.
I missed them. The ache was a hollow space beneath my ribs, a different kind of pain the aether couldn't heal.
Sevren, my first friend, with his sharp mind and his lonely delves into the Relictombs' mysteries. Renhart, the gruff, cynical wogart farmer whose grudging protection had been a stark, honest thing.
How long had it been since they'd vanished through that Descension portal?
Outside, Al-Hazred had said a week had passed when I'd first arrived, but that was too long ago to rely on anymore. Inside? It felt like lifetimes.
Three months? Four? Five? The concept had lost all meaning when Gawain had shifted back to his Preservation Avatar. The implication was as humiliating as it was clear: I wasn't worthy of his true power anymore. I was too weak to warrant the full, draconic spectacle of my own annihilation.
I missed Delilah's relentless optimism, the sheer, undimmable brightness of her spirit. I missed Yorick's quiet, analytical presence, his watchful eyes that saw so much.
Gods, I even missed Scythe Seris Vritra—her unnerving intensity, her ice-cold calculations, her infuriating attempts to steer me like a piece on her chessboard. 'Unnerving' was too weak a word for the woman, but I'd take her cold pragmatism over this endless, fiery hell any day.
At least her cage would have had a view I could share. And, a traitorous part of my mind whispered, at least Agrona probably didn't keep a genocidal dragon chained in his basement to use as a personal trainer.
His methods were likely more… clinical, even less painful.
Sylvia, inside my core! The command was a whip-crack in my mind, a thought forged in the instant before action.
Gawain moved. Not with speed, but with a spatial skip that made my eyes water. One moment he was twenty feet away; the next, his featureless blue eyes were inches from mine, his darkened greatsword already in motion.
But I'd seen it—the faint ripple in the aether, the tell-tale pull of Spatium energy a microsecond before the teleport. I'd learned to read the river's currents before the stone hit the water.
A grin, savage and tired, split my lips. I'd predicted him.
Pale gold aether erupted around my right fist, coalescing into two compact, fiercely spinning rings. At the same instant, I didn't just call for Sylvia; I aimed her.
Her will-o'-wisp form, a contained sun of devotion and power, shot from my core and into the whirling rings. I used the rings as a particle accelerator, slingshotting her essence through them at a velocity that made the very air scream.
My fist, wreathed in this contained supernova, drove forward. It didn't aim for the killing blow I could never land, but for the silver-plated shoulder plate of his sword arm. The impact was a thunderclap of released energy.
The two rings detonated on contact, and Sylvia's amplified power discharged in a concussive blast of pure force that rocked Gawain back a single, precious step. Space was the currency here. I bought a foot. A breath.
'Child, what are you thinking?' Sylvia's voice was in my ear as her wisp zipped back to orbit my head, her light flickering from the exertion. 'We have danced this exact step a thousand times. It never changes.'
But it did. It had to. I saw the aether shift again around Gawain, the subtle gathering of purple energy. Another teleport. Instinct, honed to a razor's edge, took over.
I didn't think. I flowed. My body arched backwards into a limbo bend I'd never have been capable of in my old life, the darkened blade whispering past my nose close enough to smell the ozone on its edge.
From that impossible position, my leg snapped up to kick the air right where his chest would be. Aether flared at my heel, detonating in a burst of kinetic force a fraction of a second before he fully materialized.
It was a guess, a gamble, a shot in the dark.
It connected. The blast hit his center of mass, not to harm, but to disrupt his spatial anchor for a split second. He staggered, the teleportation flickering unsurely.
Sylvia, I need you in my right hand, I thought, the plan forming and executing in the same instant. I'm going to fight back. For real this time.
I was so tired. Not in my body—the aether saw to that, a perpetual, humming engine of vitality. This was a soul-deep exhaustion, a weariness that came from the relentless, grinding pressure of futility.
I had entered this Crucible seeing it as an opportunity, a brutal forge to temper my power.
But Al-Hazred had perverted it. It wasn't a forge; it was a grinder, cruel, excruciating and neverending. He didn't want to temper me; he wanted to break me down and rebuild me in his own image. He denied me rest, not out of necessity, but as a devilishly clever tactic.
He offered no sustenance but the aether I could draw, no sleep, no respite from the pain or his incessant, hateful propaganda.
His voice was a drip of poison in my ear, constantly painting Sylvia's entire race as monsters, trying to turn me against the one constant, loving presence in this nightmare.
It was a torture routine designed to shatter a mind in seconds. Gawain destroyed me physically, using my body as a punching bag—first in his Prime Avatar, then in his Preservation one.
All the while, Al-Hazred droned on with his infuriating lectures. I wanted nothing more than to deafen myself—to stop the aether from healing my eardrums every time they burst from the thunder of Gawain's strikes.
Or when threw me against the jagged rocks of the Crucible, sending jolts of agony coursing through my entire body.
Asuras. Asuras. Asuras. Asuras. That was all Al-Hazred spoke of. He claimed I was defending a genocide.
That I was protecting a tyrannical King who slaughtered his own people simply because they refused to let themselves die after surrendering everything to Kezess Indrath.
Because they refused to comply.
And as I struggled to stand, again and again, refusing to let his torture indoctrinate me, a part of my mind twisted in doubt. Was I...? I was defending someone just like King Grey—perhaps someone even worse. NO!
I wouldn't fold.
The God of Misfortune wouldn't win here. He wouldn't use this grieving, mad Djinn as his instrument. I clung to a mantra, a scrap of philosophy from a perfectly remembered comic book:
"The only way to know how strong you are is to keep testing your limits."
Was it Jor-El who said that? It didn't matter. The sentiment was mine now.
I pushed off the ground, aether flooding my legs, and sprinted at Gawain. My right fist, now thrumming with Sylvia's concentrated presence, pulled back, charged with everything I had. I saw the aether around his sword shift again. He was going to phase it, to make it bypass my guard and take my arm. I knew this move. He'd done it before.
I repressed a smirk. He was underestimating me. No—Al-Hazred was underestimating me. He thought because I kept failing, I wasn't learning. He thought my defiance was just a child's stubbornness.
At the last possible second, I pivoted on my lead foot, a feint meant to draw the teleporting strike. But Gawain—or the algorithm controlling him—was too smart. The sword didn't appear where I expected.
Instead, he simply… vanished from my front and reappeared directly behind me. His boot, not his blade, lashed out in a casual, contemptuous kick that connected with the back of my knee.
The sound was a sickening, wet CRUNCH. My augmented leg, capable of shattering stone, buckled like a twig. The femur snapped cleanly, the jagged end tearing through muscle and grey skin. I collapsed, a cry of pain and sheer frustration tearing from my throat.
"Naive, Being of Aether and Flesh." Al-Hazred's voice was a sigh of disappointment from on high. "Attempting a feint? Such simplistic tactics are for children brawling in the dirt. They do not work against a warrior who has fought in conflicts that shaped continents."
'Iskander, calm down. Breathe. I am here. I… am here.' Sylvia's voice was a balm, a lifeline in the sea of pain and humiliation.
I felt her pull aether from my core, not in a frantic surge, but in a controlled, deliberate flow, directing it to the catastrophic break in my leg. The bone began to knit, the pain receding to a deep, throbbing ache.
Thanks, Mom… The thought was sincere, weary. She was my anchor. My answer. When I'd Created her vessel, I'd given myself more than a companion; I'd given myself a co-pilot for my own power.
The two greatest surges in my strength had been the initial awakening of my core and the moment I'd forged her will-o'-wisp.
The grinding, painful gains I'd made here in the Crucible were a paltry trickle in comparison. But they were gains in control, in finesse. Sylvia provided the raw potential; this hell was teaching me how to wield it.
Before my leg was fully mended, Gawain's silver-gauntleted hand closed around my ankle. He lifted me with effortless, insulting ease and threw me. I tumbled across the scorched rock, coming to a rest in a limp heap, staring up at the swirling, smoke-choked orange sky.
I didn't move. I just stayed there, breathing in the ash, listening to the heavy, inevitable tread of his boots as he walked toward me.
The mental strain was the true torture. The physical pain was fleeting. This… this was a slow erosion of the will. Al-Hazred, having failed to convert me with his words, was now trying to win by sheer, grinding attrition. He would break my spirit through endless, futile repetition.
"Get up, Being of Aether and Flesh." His voice was devoid of its earlier feigned warmth. It was a cold command. "The dragons you so stubbornly defend never showed my kin such patience as they hunted us to extinction. You believe Gawain formidable? You see only a fraction of his true nature. I leash him. I force him to hold back the sadistic beast he truly was—the beast that is the birthright of every Indrath."
I pushed myself up onto my elbows, my newly healed leg still throbbing. I looked toward the source of the voice, my eyes narrowed not in pain, but in a profound and weary disgust.
"Stop," I rasped, my voice rough with swallowed blood and ash. "Just stop with the racist bullshit. You're a broken record. 'The Asuras are evil. The Asuras are killers. The Asuras are tyrants.' I don't care. This stopped being about justice a long time ago, Brainiac. This became personal."
There was a moment of silence. Then, a flicker of interest in the Djinn's tone. "Oh? Are you finally feeling anger, Being of Aether and Flesh? Is the righteous fury I have been stoking finally igniting within you?"
I got to my feet, swaying slightly. I met the gaze of his aetheric form, my expression not one of rage, but of something colder, more final. Pity.
"I'm not angry," I said, my voice quiet but clear in the rumbling stillness of the volcano. "And I'm not furious. I just pity you. I pity your shriveled, hateful little existence trapped in a crystal. I pity the magnificent mind that was twisted into this… this pathetic, genocidal fantasy."
I spat onto the black rock, a final, dismissive gesture. "You want to break me? To recruit me? You'll need to work a lot harder than this and even then? You will fail."
The silence that followed was deeper than before, thick with a new kind of tension. I had rejected his narrative, his pain, his entire justification. I had not given him anger. I had given him contempt.