That was their first encounter.
The second arrived like a silent pact.
On the same day, at the same hour, minute, second—and millisecond—one year later, the light once again curled upon itself at the threshold of the throne room, and Theotia stepped forth. Skoeidos was bent over a resource allocation plan for the struggling regions of Dikaios. He merely raised his head, a slight nod as if acknowledging a natural law in motion, then returned to his numbers.
She did not speak. She simply stood with arms crossed in a corner of the room, a living statue woven of moonlight. He worked, granting audiences to ministers, listening to dry reports with a concentration that could bend space. His decisions were delivered as sharply as a slash of Midenismos—logical, without a ripple of emotion. When the sun set, she dissolved into the air.
The third time. The fourth. The tenth.
Her precision in timing was not a habit, but seemingly a natural cycle. Her presence became a constant in the equation of his rule, an uninvited but anticipated guest. And each time, he would lead her, wordlessly, to a different corner of Dikaios, like a gardener silently displaying the fruits of his labor.
But the world is not an equation. And humans are even less so.
On the seventeenth visit, the equation shattered.
When she appeared, the throne was empty. For the first time, Theotia's analytical engine faced an unforeseen variable. She found him in the royal library. The room was a universe of silence, where bookshelves rose like ancient redwood trees, and the air was thick with the scent of old paper and congealed time.
He stood before a massive star map, where the cosmos was pinned onto a single plane of beast hide. No armor, just a simple black tunic. For the first time, she saw him not as a power, but as a form. He looked like a scholar lost among his own stars.
"Your star," he said, his voice deep and resonant in the stillness, without turning around. "It is not in the correct position."
Theotia stepped to his side, a white shadow beside a black one. She looked up at the celestial chart drawn from the perspective of Anthromos, an astronomical portrait both grand and naive.
"Because it is not a star," she replied. "It is a gateway. Its position changes according to the resonance of the realms, not according to the physical laws you people measure."
He turned, and Theotia saw in those blood-ruby eyes neither challenge nor calculation. Only an abyss of pure curiosity.
"Explain it to me."
Instead of a command, it was a request. And that tiny shift shook the balance of their dynamic.
Theotia explained. She spoke of the invisible currents of energy connecting the worlds, of how time in Elysium did not flow like a river but existed like an ocean. Skoeidos listened. He did not interrupt. His intellect absorbed the knowledge like a black hole swallowing light. For the first time, he was not being observed. He was learning.
In return, he did something unprecedented. He led her to a dark corner of the library, where texts were shackled by forbidden spells.
He produced a scroll of pitch-black parchment, sealed with a wax that, when touched, sounded like the breaking of distant stars. He opened it. Inside was not destructive magic, but complex schematics describing the mineral structures and mana flows of Tartarus. A blueprint of the abyss. He handed it to Theotia—not as a boast, but as an exchange of raw data.
She took it. Her elegant fingers traced the jagged characters as if reading an ancient score. There was no disgust.
"Fascinating," she remarked, her voice as even as water flowing over stone. "This structure bears a startling resemblance to Elysium. Though somewhat more brutal, it is efficient to the point of perfection. Everything is drawn toward a central singularity; nothing escapes. An absolutely closed system."
Skoeidos looked at her. She did not judge. She had looked into the heart of the abyss and saw no sin, only knowledge.
In that moment, they were no longer adversaries, no longer observer and observed. They were two great intellects, attempting to read the same universe through two opposing pages.
From then on, the visits transformed.
Sometimes, they strolled through the hanging gardens atop the towers. The azure stone rose had spread, claiming a section of the planter, turning a flaw into a manifesto. Theotia spoke of plants in Elysium that lived on pure light. He told her of how he had once single-handedly engaged a Tartarian army to conquer the realm of Tartarus—a story that was... rather gruesome.
Sometimes, they sat in the library for hours. He showed her the ancient texts of Tartarus, records of primordial creatures and the ruthless laws of the deep. She taught him how to read the stars from Elysium's perspective, how to see the fragile threads of destiny connecting all things.
Centuries passed like pages turning in silence.
Theotia's presence was no longer a disruptive variable. It had become a self-evident truth in Skoeidos's life. She had opened corridors in his mind he never knew existed, showed him universes contained within a grain of sand, and laws operating on an elegant logic that the abyss could never replicate.
And Theotia—she changed as well.
The analytical machine within her began to record data that could not be quantified. Upon returning to Elysium, her reports became unsolvable problems. How does one write of the "burden" of an anomalous king? How does one classify the "loneliness" in eyes looking down upon a sleeping kingdom? These concepts had no units of measurement; they were lines of corrupted code in a perfect spell matrix. The Archons began to ask questions. Her logic remained sharp, but the input data had been "contaminated" by something they called... empathy. For the first time, she began to hide parts of the truth—not out of deceit, but because she knew Elysium's logic engine would view them only as errors and delete them.
She saw, behind Skoeidos's ruthless efficiency, an endless war. A war with the abyss within his own being, a primal beast chained by a singular will. He was not a rancher. He was a solitary sentinel on the precipice of his own abyss, trying to protect a garden that even he did not understand why it was worth protecting.
She saw the fatigue settling in the corners of his eyes when he thought she wasn't looking. She saw the emptiness in his shadow stretching long across the throne.
These were unprocessable data points. They were not logic. They were a different language.
And then, on the hundred and first visit, as autumn was burning itself out in its final breaths, the equation broke.
They were in the hanging garden. Sunset stained the sky like a purple-orange bruise. A cold wind, carrying the whisper of approaching winter, swept through the garden. Theotia, in her thin peplos woven of light, involuntarily shivered.
It was a tiny reflex, a mortal truth betraying her Elysian nature.
But Skoeidos saw it.
Without a word, he unclasped his black cloak and draped it over her shoulders.
The cloak was heavier than she imagined, as if woven from condensed night and the weight of a throne. The warmth from it was not the purity of light, but a worldly heat, distilled from the body of a creature that had walked through ten thousand years of solitude. The smell of old paper from the library, of leather from inspection tours, and a hint of cinnamon mixed with the metallic tang of darkness invaded her senses. Each detail was an anomaly, an irrational datum, yet they combined into a single message her logic could not refute: Care.
Theotia froze. She looked at him, her twilight-purple eyes widening, reflecting a dying sky. This action was useless. Illogical. A poem written in motion.
Skoeidos looked at her, and for a moment, the eternal wall of ice in his eyes seemed to melt. He saw her not as an Empyrean, not as a rival, but simply as someone shivering in the wind.
"I am not certain," he said, his voice low, but for the first time, the frost within it seemed to crack. "But I believe... you are cold."
In that moment, Theotia realized a truth more earth-shattering than an Abyssord ruling an Anthromos kingdom.
She, a living theorem of law and order, had become a wildflower in his garden of logic. A beautiful anomaly, without function, yet one he could not bring himself to uproot.
And she realized, with painful clarity, that she no longer wanted to leave this garden.
The machine that could calculate the trajectories of galaxies within Theotia's mind stalled for the first time. It tried to assign a function to the action, but every equation led to a dead end. Only one bare answer remained, unprovable and needing no proof: He saw she was cold. And he did not want that.
Skoeidos turned away almost immediately, a sudden gesture as if he had touched fire. He looked down at the city, trying to force the world back into familiar laws, where stone was stone and wind was merely the movement of air.
But then he froze.
In the same instant, Theotia felt it. A discordant vibration in the tapestry of reality. Not the pure energy of Elysium, nor the mundane magic of Anthromos. It was a wrong note, the screech of a snapping thread. An ulcer.
To the west of Aethelburg, right over the golden wheat fields awaiting harvest, the sky did not tear. It screamed. A wound opened its mouth on the skin of the world, pitch black, swallowing the sunset light. Its edges convulsed with chaotic purple and red energy, like the lips of a wound that could not heal. The shriek of a tortured reality echoed all the way to the tower's peak.
From within the wound, a filthy flood began to pour out. Swarms of Fiends, led by two Netherions—embodiments of pure hunger—spilled onto the fields. Following them were grotesque beasts armed with horns and claws. A Tartarian army.
And then, a figure stepped out, majestic in his brutality. His spiked armor was forged from the metal of the abyss. A greatsword with a serrated blade dripped dark energy like venom. He was a twisted reflection of Skoeidos. If Skoeidos was the static darkness of a deep ocean, this being was the explosive rage of a volcano.
Tetsudo tou Midaminotis. Skoeidos's twin brother.
Theotia's analytical engine faced a chaos of data that nearly overloaded it. She saw Skoeidos, but a Skoeidos never worn down by a century of rule, never challenged by a wildflower. This was primal, unrestrained fury. He was the answer to a question Skoeidos had never dared to ask: What would I be without chains? Looking at Tetsudo, she truly measured the depth of the abyss Skoeidos had to bridge every single day.
The name was a curse. Skoeidos stared at his reflection. Tetsudo roared, a wordless sound filled with the hatred of a millennium, and swung his greatsword. A wave of pure dark energy hurtled toward the walls of Aethelburg.
Before Skoeidos could act, a streak of white light cut across. Theotia, with Lupusnia in hand, drew a perfect line in the air. Pure light collided with darkness. A silent explosion. The two opposing energies canceled each other out, leaving only a shockwave that uprooted trees.
"He is mine," Skoeidos growled, not to Theotia, but as a law just decreed to the universe.
He dove from the tower, not like a meteor, but like a piece of the night sky detaching itself to fall.
Below, the "Iron Wall" of Dikaios was in position. Shields locked together, spears pointing forward. An immobile steel hedgehog. They were the product of centuries of training under a ruthless logic: efficiency, discipline, and fearlessness.
"Hold fast!" the commander's voice rang out. "For the King and for Dikaios!"
The first wave of Fiends crashed in. They slammed into the shield wall. The sound of metal clashing, growls, and screams merged into a symphony of destruction. The Dikaios army held. Spears thrust out and retracted in rhythm; every stab was a note in their symphony of death.
Theotia landed on the flank of the formation. She did not fight like a warrior; she was a theorem proving itself. She did not parry, only evaded. Lupusnia drew long trails of light. Wherever she passed, Fiends turned to ash, their shrieks silenced.
But the center of the battle was the confrontation between two principles.
Skoeidos landed, the impact cracking the earth. Without a word, he charged at Tetsudo. Midenismos and the serrated greatsword Nihirizumu collided.
CLANG!
Reality buckled. Time nearly stopped.
The sound was not of metal. It was the sound of two laws canceling each other out, of two realities colliding and tearing each other apart. A silent note shattered in space, and from its epicenter, an invisible quake swept out, blowing away both ally and enemy within dozens of meters.
"Brother!" Tetsudo roared, his voice like tortured metal. "Look at you! Weak! The stench of humanity clings to you! And the smell of that fake Elysian light! HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YOUR NATURE?"
He poured all his rage into the greatsword, muscles bulging beneath spiked armor. He was stronger. The dark energy of Tartarus boiled in his veins like a storm.
"I have forgotten nothing," Skoeidos grit out, his blood-ruby eyes glowing like coals in the wind. "I simply chose a different path."
But he knew Tetsudo was right, in part. He had starved the primal beast in his chest with thin air and the peace of the mortal realm, instead of the chaotic energy, fresh blood, and screaming souls of the abyss. His raw power was no longer a river of lava. It had been distilled into something else: discipline. He could not waste it on meaningless clashes but had to use the one thing Tetsudo never possessed.
Skoeidos did not fight the storm. He became the deep water beneath it. A slight turn of the wrist. Midenismos slid along Tetsudo's blade, creating a shower of black sparks, shearing off the serrations on the greatsword. Using his opponent's own strength to deflect the attack, he lowered his center of gravity, pivoting inside where Tetsudo's defense was empty. A slash as fast as a thought aimed at the gap in the armor at the hip.
Tetsudo bellowed, a sound half-pain, half-fury, and stumbled back. Blood seeped out.
"Human tricks!" he screamed. "Weak! Cowardly!"
He charged again, more frenzied. Every slash carried enough weight to collapse a mountain. The earth was churned to ruin. But Skoeidos was a ghost, a void. His steps seemed slow, yet they always placed him exactly where the blade of Nihirizumu had passed a millisecond before. Their dance was a dialogue between two principles: primal fury and tempered will.
Every time Tetsudo overextended, Midenismos left a new signature on his flesh. Not deep, but each cut was a drop of water eroding the stone of his endurance.
Madness welled up in Tetsudo's eyes like a black tide. He glanced around, seeking a weakness, a lever.
And his eyes locked on it.
Not far away, a group of trapped farmers was being escorted by soldiers to the evacuation point. Weak. Soft. Fragile. The image of a young mother clutching her small child, her face a portrait of terror, caught his eye.
A cruel smile tore across Tetsudo's face.
With a savage roar, he channeled all his energy into his legs, launching a leap that broke him away from the duel, hurtling toward the civilians like a poison-tipped arrow.
"If I cannot have your soul, I will shred the souls of these pets!"
His speed was an insult to physics. The young mother stood frozen, squeezing her eyes shut, turning her body into a final shield.
"NO!"
Theotia screamed from the far side, but she was a star too distant. Her light could not catch up to an event already in motion. The analytical engine within her screamed a conclusion as cold as ice. Speed. Trajectory. Distance. The result appeared in a microsecond: Skoeidos could not stop that attack without paying an incalculable price. Logic dictated he let them die. They were merely numbers in an equation. Sacrificing a pawn to save the King was a rational act.
But Theotia's logic was no longer Skoeidos's logic.
Time did not slow down. It shattered into a million shards of glass.
In each shard, a different image flashed.
The blue stone rose, growing amidst the herbs, its illogical but resilient existence.
Theotia's eyes when he draped the cloak over her shoulders—a dry equation seeing a poem for the first time.
The mother and child. They were other wildflowers. Fragile, temporary, serving no significant purpose in a grand machine.
And he realized, with painful clarity, that the path he chose was not to build a machine.
It was to guard a garden.
And a garden must be protected, at any cost.
Darkness contracted into a straight line. Skoeidos did not chase. He became a blur, an event in the process of happening, a race against the final moment of a shattering world.
Faster than Tetsudo, but not enough.
As the greatsword Nihirizumu screamed with hunger, about to cleave through the mother and child, Skoeidos arrived. He did not block. He made himself a shield.
SHLICK!
Blood sprayed, staining the earth red, a brutal stroke of calligraphy painted against the sunset sky. The left arm. The arm that had draped the cloak over Theotia's shoulders now lay severed on the ground, fingers still twitching.
Pain was a black sun exploding in his nerves. He did not flinch. He used it. He turned it into fuel. Exploiting the moment Tetsudo was drunk on savage victory, Skoeidos pivoted, channeling every ounce of his fury into a single motion. Midenismos sang the song of the end, inscribing a perfect upward arc.
The blade of nothingness passed through Tetsudo without resistance, as if he were merely a wrong thought that needed to be erased. The power of Midenismos, chained by Skoeidos for centuries, detonated in a single instant, tearing not just flesh but reality itself along the slash, leaving a jagged black tear in the cosmic fabric where the Void leaked through.
Tetsudo froze, eyes wide in terrible surprise. A cruel symmetry divided his body. The two halves slowly slid apart, collapsing to the ground before turning to ash. From within the dissipating smoke, a final whisper echoed, faint as the breath of a dying star: "You... have become weak... Go back... to the abyss."
Skoeidos stumbled, dropping to one knee. Midenismos stabbed into the earth, becoming a crutch for a collapsing king. The wound on his shoulder smoked with black mist, the flesh writhing in a desperate attempt to regenerate. His body, a machine once fed by souls and chaos, was now struggling to repair itself with the memory of energy. Centuries of "fasting" had left his source of power dry.
Theotia and the young mother ran to him simultaneously.
"Your Majesty!" the mother sobbed, her face a painting of horror and infinite gratitude.
Theotia knelt beside him, her hands radiating the pure light of Elysium, her very essence, pouring from her palms.
"Do not move!"
She placed her hands on the wound.
Instantly, Skoeidos roared. The sound was not of a king, but of a primal being burning. Her light, the embodiment of order and harmony, was poison to a creature woven from threads of darkness.
"Stop!" he grit out, teeth clenched. "It... only makes it worse."
Theotia recoiled as if burned, her face pale. Her logic, a crystal tower built over millennia, crumbled into dust. Her power, capable of mending tears in the universe, was powerless before the wound of one man.
Just then, the young mother turned to the crowd, her voice breaking into a scream: "Hurry! Call a Dark Mage! The King needs healing!"
Skoeidos remained kneeling, breathing heavily. He looked at the empty space where his arm used to be, then at Theotia. For the first time, she saw naked weakness on his face, unmasked. And she realized, with a clarity that made her non-existent heart ache:
He had torn away a part of the abyss within himself, not to win a war, but to keep a flower from being trampled.
The storm vanished as quickly as it had gathered.
When the leader fell, the Tartarian army broke like a breached dam. The weaker Fiends were swallowed by the shield wall; others fled madly back toward the wound in the sky, which was slowly stitching itself shut. Soon, the field held only twisted corpses and a heavy silence, thick with the smell of blood and the pungent stench of Fiends.
The spatial tear shrank, then vanished. The sky wore the colors of a fake sunset, as if it had never been violated.
But the blood on the ground was real.
Skoeidos still knelt there, a shattered statue of black armor on the earth. His blood, thick as tar, had stained a wide area, its smell overpowering the scent of ripe wheat. The severed arm had dissolved into dust, and the wound on his shoulder was still roaring a silent battle. Dark red muscle fibers trembled, seeking each other, knitting together in a slow, agonizing effort of regeneration.
Theotia stood beside him, hands clenched, the feeling of helplessness a crack in her crystal palace of logic. The universe obeyed laws she understood, yet she was powerless before a broken body. She was a perfect equation, but right now, all that power was useless before a bleeding poem. Her light was a lethal dose to a Tartarian.
A Dark Mage, old as the soil he stood upon, was escorted by soldiers. He dared not look Skoeidos in the eye, kneeling at a safe distance.
"Your Majesty," he whispered in a voice dry as dead leaves. "Please allow me..."
Skoeidos only nodded, a heavy gesture. He hated this. Hated exposing his decay to his subjects. But more than that, he felt Theotia's gaze on his back. That gaze was a cut deeper than the wound on his shoulder. He had let her see his failure, the price of an illogical act. Rage and shame coiled within him, but his body was too exhausted to obey.
The mage began to chant. Theotia heard it. Not a spell, but a small chorus of death. He was not creating life; he was bargaining with it. The weeds beneath his feet withered, their tiny souls drained, turning into a greasy green smoke. That smoke, carrying the final breath of stolen life, wrapped around Skoeidos's wound.
Unlike Theotia's light, this rotting magic felt "familiar" to his body. Regeneration accelerated. Muscle fibers and veins knit together faster, a soft hissing sound rising as new skin formed.
But it was still slow. Abnormally slow. Like trying to patch a cloth that had been rotting for thousands of years.
Theotia watched. And then, the analytical machine in her mind did not produce a conclusion. It crashed.
Because the logic was correct, but the premise was wrong. Tetsudo's words were the truth. He had become weak. Centuries of ruling with reason instead of instinct, centuries of refusing the meal of souls and flesh. He had placed himself on a metaphysical fast, and his body had forgotten the energy of the abyss.
The act of rushing out to shield them was not a decision. It was a symptom.
A symptom of hundreds of years of silent change. The bond he had forged with this kingdom, with these fragile creatures, had cost him more than just an arm.
He had traded a part of the abyss for a part of humanity.
The young mother was no longer crying. Her tears had dried, leaving something else in her eyes, a look Skoeidos had never received in his endless life. Not the awe of a subject, nor the hatred of the defeated. It was compassion. To him, it was an alien sensation, a warm shard of glass embedded in the deepest part of his being.
The new arm finally took shape, pale, a whisper of flesh and bone regarding the price paid. Skoeidos flexed, the new hand clenching and opening with difficulty. He stood up, an action requiring every scrap of his remaining will. He swayed for a moment, then the cold majesty of a king once again became his spine.
"Clean up the battlefield," he ordered, his voice a monumental effort to sculpt fatigue into authority. "Tally and address the damages. Compensate the families of the fallen, if any."
Every word was a stone laid down to rebuild the wall of ice that had just collapsed around him. He did not look at Theotia, nor at the mother. He simply turned and walked away, his gait slightly stiff. A fortress of vulnerability retreating.
Theotia watched him go. The black cloak was still on her shoulders, heavy as an unspoken vow. She looked down at her hands. Hands that could cradle destiny were now completely empty.
Logic, the crystal machine within her, delivered a cold conclusion: Skoeidos was weakened. A potential threat had been diminished. The paradox was correcting itself.
But something else, a dissonant note just sprouting in her eternal harmony, was screaming. She did not see a diminished threat. She saw a sentinel burning himself to keep his garden warm. She saw a sacrifice understood by no one, not even the one who had made it.
She looked up at the sky, now more distant than ever, a promise of unfeeling stasis. Then she looked at that solitary back, walking toward the citadel.