The choice was no longer an equation. It was a truth.
Theotia tightened her grip on the cloak. The thick fabric still held warmth—a worldly, fragile warmth that was slowly dissipating into the cold air. She took a deep breath. The scent of old paper, of darkness, and of a loneliness so vast it possessed its own gravity flooded her mind. It was no longer alien. This cloak was not merely a gift. It was a tether. And if she severed it now, he would be truly alone.
She walked. Her steps no longer sought the light of the stars.
She was following a shadow that had just learned how to bleed.
The gates of Aethelburg swallowed him, but Skoeidos did not return to the throne, nor did he seek the quiet of his study. He went down.
He descended through corridors that grew progressively colder, sinking deep into the citadel's foundation, into its forgotten memories. He sought a place long sealed—the old dungeon of the previous dynasty. The air here was not air. It was the cold sweat of stone, the sediment of centuries of despair dried into dust.
His most loyal soldiers, shadows accustomed to silence and wordless orders, quietly carried the remnants of the battle behind him. The corpses of the strongest Fiends, of the deformed beasts. The spiked armor and the greatsword Nihirizumu of Tetsudo were laid neatly on the stone floor, like a silent blasphemy.
"Leave me."
His voice was a crack in the stillness. The soldiers bowed and withdrew. The massive iron door groaned and slammed shut, the sound of metal meeting stone ringing out like a final period, locking Skoeidos in with the darkness and the dead.
The darkness in the dungeon was nearly absolute, a living entity one could almost taste. But to him, darkness was home. It was the womb that had birthed him.
He stood amidst the corpses, closed his eyes, and felt them. The remnants of dark energy, the shattered fragments of souls, the final breaths of chaotic life. A meal. A necessary dose of medicine to heal.
The beast, starved for centuries within his ribcage, roared. A thick, acidic taste rose in his throat. Eat. Hunger screamed in every fiber of his being. Tear them apart. Drink their souls dry. Reclaim what was lost. That was the language of the abyss. Fast, efficient, and with no room for weakness.
But he did not move.
Hundreds of years of rule had taught him one thing: savagery is the language of the weak. A king requires respect even for what is lost, built upon authority, not terror constructed from revulsion.
He extended his newly regenerated hand, palm facing down. A deep red magic circle drew itself upon the stone floor, encompassing the pile of bodies. He needed no incantation. His will alone was the spell.
The corpses began to vibrate. They did not rot; they unraveled. Flesh, bone, and armor did not tear, but dissolved, disintegrating into a river of ink flowing backward toward its source. He did not greedily inhale that pitch-black mist. He distilled it. With sheer will, he separated the essence—power, life—from the dregs of hatred and maddened hunger. This was not the act of a starving beast. This was the ritual of an alchemist working with the most dangerous elements of creation.
The black mist did not rise but swirled, sucked toward him as if he were a singularity. It did not rush into his nose but seeped through his skin, flowing into his veins. It felt like a black river flowing upstream, filling dry channels. The life of the abyss: cold, emotionless, yet immortal.
His new arm grew solid, the skin darkening, no longer a pale imitation. Strength was returning. The dull ache did not vanish; it was replaced by a powerful emptiness.
Just then, a dissonant chord rang out from the door. Not the sound of broken metal, but the sound of rigidity being bent, of an order imposed by a will stronger than iron.
The heavy iron door, an object that had forgotten how to move, slowly opened in reluctant obedience.
Theotia stood there. A statue woven of light in the pitch-black corridor. His cloak remained on her shoulders. Lupusnia at her hip did not blaze; it emitted only a cold halo, enough to turn her into a phantom from another universe.
She stood at the threshold, feeling the thick, cloying dark energy rolling out like the breath of a predator that had just torn apart its prey. Every thread of law that wove her being screamed at her to retreat. This place was a blasphemy, a hole in the perfect tapestry of creation. But the old logic was no longer the only truth. A new concept, born from the sacrifice on the battlefield and the warmth of the cloak, told her that he was in there, facing his own abyss. And she could not leave him alone in that darkness any longer.
She stepped across the threshold. That small action was an oath to a new universe.
She looked at the scene before her: Skoeidos standing amidst a black vortex, a feast. She saw the power flowing back into him, filling the voids that sacrifice had left behind.
She felt no horror, no disgust. Her face was a still lake after a storm. She had anticipated this.
"Was this necessary?" her voice rang out, not as a question, but as a confirmation.
Skoeidos opened his eyes. His blood-ruby irises were now sated, glowing with a cold light. The vortex of black energy was finally fully absorbed into his body, leaving the stone floor eerily clean.
"Strength is a necessity," he replied, his voice having regained its deep stability, like boulders shifting deep underground. "Today was a reminder. Weakness threatens this kingdom. Today I lost an arm. Tomorrow it could be my head. Or even this entire realm."
"That is the power of the abyss," Theotia said, stepping deeper inside. "It is distilled from destruction. You spent centuries turning your back on it."
"I did not turn my back," Skoeidos corrected, stepping toward her. "I chained it. Today, I was negligent, and the price was nearly the lives of the sheep I am responsible for protecting."
He stopped in front of her. The distance was merely an arm's length. The darkness from him and the light from her did not war.
"You saw it, Theotia," he said, his voice dropping low. "Your light could not heal me. Your logic could not protect them. To keep this garden from being trampled, sometimes the watchman must become the monster the garden fears."
Theotia looked straight into his eyes, unflinching.
"No."
That simple, absolute denial made him pause.
"You are no longer a monster," Theotia continued. "A monster does not throw itself in the path of a fatal blow meant for a mortal. A monster does not feel the weight of responsibility. The monster you speak of... perhaps it starved to death long ago, right on that throne."
She reached out, her hand extending not to attack, but to gently touch his newly regenerated arm. This time, there was no conflict. Light and darkness did not roar. They fell silent.
"What I saw today was not a monster weakening," she said, her voice carrying a warmth Skoeidos had never heard, a frequency that could melt the metal of the abyss. "But a king being born."
In the darkness of the dungeon, amidst the scent of death, her words were not a seed of light. They were a key.
He had spent centuries building a fortress. She did not destroy it. She simply walked up and showed him a door he never knew existed. He had always viewed himself through the lens of Tartarus: a ruler, a predator, a chained beast.
But she looked at him and saw something else. The King. The word was not just a title. In her mouth, it was absolution.
He did not answer. In the silence of the dungeon, a king no longer had to fight his monster. Because he had just been told, in a language more ancient than both the abyss and the stars, that the monster had never truly been him.
The path to Skoeidos's private chambers was not a journey through gilded splendor, but a deep dive into austerity.
This place held no spirit of a king, but bore the breath of an ascetic. A large bed, a heavy desk laden with maps and books, and a balcony opening to the hanging garden where theorems were grown in plant form. No gold. No jewels. Only function, honed to the point of becoming a stark art form.
He walked to the window, looking out at the night swallowing the kingdom. The dark energy he had just absorbed was not a clear spring. It left an aftertaste—the ash of the abyss—and a fatigue etched into the marrow of his will. The battle, and the moment of regeneration, had taken more than just an arm.
"Go back, Theotia," he said as he began removing pieces of his armor, his voice deep and distant, as if echoing from a snowy peak. "The danger has passed. Your mission is over."
Theotia did not move. She stood in the center of the room, a silent pillar of light wrapped in Skoeidos's black cloak. That stillness was a presence, heavier than any refusal.
"My mission," she finally spoke, her voice soft as moonlight but solid as a law, "is to ensure you do not become a danger to this realm."
Skoeidos turned his head slightly, one brow raised, a trace of weary irony. "And? Did I not just prove the opposite?"
"You did," Theotia replied, and she walked toward him, each step a note in a symphony just written. "That is precisely the problem. For a century, I came here looking for a Monarch Abyssord, a monster that needed monitoring. But I never saw his shadow."
She stopped, the distance between them enough for the air to crack. Moonlight from outside rimmed her golden hair with a silver halo.
"What I saw was the burden of a crown never worn. It was the fatigue in a body that requires no sleep. It was the solitude of a cracked throne, where one's own echo is the only conversationalist."
Her voice was like a stream flowing into the desert of Skoeidos's soul. He turned fully to face her.
"Once a year," she continued, her eyes never leaving him, "I came and went like a cosmic cycle. I thought I was merely an observer. But I was wrong. I was not observing a cycle. I had become part of it."
His breath seemed to suspend.
"I became accustomed to your existence," she confessed, her voice trembling for the first time with a vibration logic could not control. "Accustomed to the point where its absence would now be a tear in my own universe. I only realized it... when I saw you fall."
She took one final step, entering his shadow, looking straight up into his blood-ruby eyes. "I no longer see an anomaly to be analyzed. I see a soul to be understood."
And then, she said it, simple and sincere as the nature of light itself.
"Skoeidos... I have, unwittingly, given my heart to you."
That sentence. Spoken not as an Empyrean to an Abyssord, but as a woman to a man. It was a key inserted into the final lock he did not know existed.
The ramparts of his will, built of discipline and solitude over millennia, did not collapse. They simply evaporated. Logic, his final defense system, shattered into meaningless shards of crystal.
And for the first time, the abyss within him did not roar.
It merely gazed silently up at a star that had decided not to leave.
"You do not know what you are saying," he whispered, a final, fragile line of defense erected from the ashes of logic. Reason within him, a machine that had run for millennia, was screaming one word: blasphemy. She was light; he was darkness. This combination would not create a dawn, but a silent self-destruction, an implosion of two opposing laws. He stepped back instinctively, a final effort to protect the star from the gravity of the abyss within him.
"No," Theotia replied. Her voice did not waver. She took another step, raising her hand, slender fingers gently touching his cheek. Not the cold of a star, but the worldly, impossible warmth of a living being. "The nature I know," she said, "is the nature of the one who draped a cloak over me when I was cold."
That touch was the final catalyst. A truth that was, in itself, an axiom, nullifying a universe of doubt. He looked into her eyes and saw absolute faith, a reflection in which, for the first time, he was not a monster. And he realized that pushing her away would be more painful than any destruction. Millennia of solitude crumbled in a single moment.
The gravity of an accepted truth took hold. He leaned down, and she reached up. Their kiss was not an explosion of passion, but a meeting of two solitudes. The crystallized silence of a distant star and the deep, slow pulse of a planetary core.
He lifted her, as gently as if she were a theorem written in starlight. No haste, no roughness. Every movement was a discovery. As the layers of robes and tunics were shed, it was not the baring of flesh, but the dismantling of two worlds.
Her skin was cool, smooth as nebula dust, but where he touched, a worldly heat bloomed, a life his logic could not define. His skin, to her, was not the cold of the abyss, but carried the patient warmth of stone that had weathered millennia of darkness. Her breath tasted of starlight; his tasted of ancient earth and stillness. Every sensation was a new datum, a new law being written solely for the two of them.
And then, they merged. Merged in every sound, every sensation, every breath.
It was not a collision, but a coalescence. A silent symphony of light and darkness.
His darkness did not extinguish her light; it gave the light a canvas to burn upon, like stars against the night sky.
Her light did not purge Skoeidos's darkness; it filled the loneliest voids, illuminating hidden corners he himself had never dared to look into.
For Theotia, it was the first time she felt primal life—chaotic but intense, a power unbound by law. She felt the pain of millennia and a resilient will that had forged that pain into a form of black diamond.
For Skoeidos, it was the first time he heard the harmonious music of the universe, felt the perfect connection of all things. She was order in his chaos, beauty in a world of mere function.
In that room, a silent explosion occurred. Not of destruction, but of creation. A new reality was born, existing only between the two of them, belonging neither to Elysium nor Tartarus. A place where an Empyrean could feel, and an Abyssord could love.
Dawn did not break; it crept into the room, casting its first rays upon two intertwined forms. Theotia lay nestled in Skoeidos's arms.
She was no longer an observer. She had become the other half of a paradox.
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The return was no longer a dissolution. Light was no longer the exit.
With an effort of will, Theotia traced a shimmering line on the fabric of space, a gate between the ascetic bedroom in Dikaios and the infinite stillness of Elysium. She looked back at Skoeidos one last time—a gaze that was a silent promise sealed by a dawn just lost—then stepped through. The tear closed, leaving behind a silence heavier than before.
When Theotia walked, Perfection rushed in, but it now felt alien. The air in Elysium was not air; it was polished emptiness. The eternal symphony of the universe still played, but that absolute precision was now a prison. This absolute correctness stifled her. It lacked the randomness of a wildflower sprouting amidst an herb bed, lacked the weight of a cloak woven from darkness.
She stood in the Hall of Judgment, a place where space and concept were one. At the center, on a throne woven of primordial light, the Demiurge presided. Not a form, but a singularity where all laws began and ended, a vast consciousness whose very presence was the law.
Around her, on floating crystal tiers, stood the other Empyreans, living theorems. A group stood apart, their light sharing the same hue as Theotia herself. The Empyrean Danesti clan. Her parents and siblings. They did not look at her with anger, but with a silence far heavier—the profound sadness of entities never taught how to feel sadness.
"Theotia de Empyrean Danesti," the voice of the Demiurge was not sound, but a vibration of the fabric of reality itself, resonating directly into her mind. "Thou hast returned."
"Supreme One," Theotia bowed. A gesture of respect, not submission.
"Thy report is an equation already solved," the Demiurge continued. "The anomaly named Skoeidos tou Midaminotis hath been analyzed. He is no longer a direct threat. The influence of Anthromos, and of thou, has weakened his Tartarian nature. Elysium accepteth such existence, as one accepteth a volcano that hath ceased to erupt. He may remain in the mortal realm, under the identity of Skoeidos von Dikaios."
A wave of silent murmurs ran through the Empyreans. But Theotia knew the hardest part was yet to come.
"Yet," the Demiurge's voice rang out, freezing every vibration. "The remaining matter lieth with thee, Theotia. Thou didst tarry beyond the cycles. Thou didst intervene in a war. And thou hast... bound thyself unto a paradox."
Theotia raised her head, looking straight into the epicenter of existence. "I do not deny it."
"Emotion is a variable permitted within the cosmic equation. But for an Empyrean to bind with an Abyssord... 'tis a heresy against the very statutes of creation. If thou desirest to walk this path, thou must prove this is no fleeting error of sentiment. Thou must prove that thou comprehendest the weight of this choice."
Theotia had anticipated this. She was ready.
"I am ready," she said, her voice steadfast as a newly enacted law.
"Then relinquish that which weaveth thee into this realm," the Demiurge declared. "Lupusnia, the heartbeat of the Empyrean Danesti clan, the sword of destiny. And a portion of thy Empyrean power, the umbilical cord connecting thou to the Primordial Light. Leave them here in Elysium. Become thou something closer to a mortal, that thou mayest break as they do. Such is the price of a paradox."
Silence blanketed the Hall, cold as the space between stars. To relinquish a part of her essence.
It was not a punishment. It was a molting.
Theotia did not hesitate.
She gently unclasped Lupusnia from her hip. The gesture held no regret, only the solemnity of a ritual. Immediately, from within the endless light, a white shadow quietly took form. It was a massive Celestial Wolf, its fur as white as the first snow on a world that had never known dust, its eyes a deep blue like the memory of Elysium itself. The guardian spirit of the Empyrean Danesti clan.
It approached and sat before her, a living statue of eternal loyalty. Its gaze did not judge; it only understood.
Theotia knelt, facing it, lifting Lupusnia with both hands. "This blade belongs to the Empyrean Danesti clan," she said, her voice echoing in the Hall, every word a pulse of truth. "I return it to its source."
She placed the sword before the wolf. The Celestial Wolf nodded slightly, a gesture carrying the weight of millennia, then gently took the sword in its jaws and backed into the light, vanishing.
Now remained only the hardest part. Theotia stood, closed her eyes, and looked inward. She sought her Divinity, the Empyrean light that had shaped her since the beginning. She separated a part of it, a part of her connection to the cosmic ocean, a part of her ability to see through the threads of destiny.
A sphere of brilliant light slowly drifted from her chest, hovering before her, carrying the faint pulse of a star torn from its galaxy. The moment it fully separated, the eternal symphony she had always heard suddenly grew distant, muffled, as if heard through a thick crystal wall. Her vision narrowed, focusing on a single direction. Blind spots. For the first time, she had blind spots. And for the first time, she felt gravity, not as an abstract law, but as a real pull, a tether binding her to a singular reality. A new sensation crept in: fatigue.
"This portion of power," she said, her voice holding a slight rasp it never had before, "I return to Elysium, to the eternal harmony."
The sphere of light ascended, merging into the brilliant aura of the Demiurge.
She was different. Still an Elysian, but no longer an omnipotent Empyrean. A demigod.
Theotia de Empyrean Danesti was now Theotia von Dikaios.
Half of the Elysians looked at her with the icy gaze of judgment. The other half, including her clan, merely remained silent. Neither blessing nor hindering.
The Demiurge finally spoke, his voice seeming to hold something akin to the sigh of stars. "If blame there be, let it fall upon the love we Elysians bear for all things—for it is vast beyond measure."
He was silent for a moment, then continued. "Thou hast made thy choice. Go forth, and return unto it."
As soon as He finished speaking, a carriage of pearlescent white appeared. A carriage drawn by two Pegasi, their coats purely white, manes flowing like liquid light, stepping upon clouds of their own making.
It was not an expulsion. It was a bridal procession. A silent blessing from the Supreme One, who had declared He would not bless.
As she walked toward the carriage, she passed her clan. Her father, an Empyrean bearing the light of a blue sun, gave only a slight nod, a bitter acknowledgment containing both pride and disappointment. Her mother, whose hair was woven of nebulas, did not look at her, but a tiny tear of light fell, evaporating before it hit the floor. Her younger brother, who had always competed with her, was silent this time, his eyes holding a respect she had never seen.
That was their silent farewell.
Theotia smiled, a warm and very "human" smile, one containing both gratitude and the sorrow of parting. She stepped into the carriage. The door closed. The two Pegasi neighed, a sound clear as a bell, then kicked their hooves, pulling the carriage through the skies of Elysium.
This time, she did not open the gate herself. A new gate opened before the carriage, a final gift.
It led straight to the gates of Aethelburg.
She was coming home.