Axiros sat in the middle of the room, violet eyes catching the diffused afternoon light. His white hair, streaked through with violet, shifted with the faint breeze coming through the window.
'Something is off with this body,' he thought, turning the observation over slowly. 'How did I reach the intermediate level of the Five Arts to Hell in two weeks? Two weeks. That is not natural by any standard I have ever encountered.' He let out a quiet breath. 'Not that I'm complaining.'
He extended his awareness inward, studying the vessel more carefully.
'The bloodline is strange. It pulses constantly — some frequency I can't immediately place, faint enough that I almost missed it, but completely unlike anything I've come across before. The original host had some kind of connection to something. And I still haven't received his memories.' He filed it away without urgency. 'After the ritual. There's time.'
'And the physique development — why is it moving this fast? I've inhabited countless bodies. This rate of growth has no precedent.' He sat with that for a moment. 'This life really is going to be something else.'
Over the past few weeks, the work on Stark had progressed exactly as intended. Slow and patient — each conversation a small increment, each interaction carefully placed. By now Stark believed completely. Not just that Axiros could retrieve Maria, but that he was, in some quiet way, something beyond ordinary. Something capable of things that shouldn't be possible.
A useful belief to cultivate in a man with Stark's reach.
'He's almost fully mine now,' Axiros thought, without any particular feeling about it. 'Emotionally dependent, completely committed, and entirely convinced I'm doing this out of goodwill. A faithful dog. A very powerful, very useful faithful dog.'
A knock at the door.
"Axiros. It's me." Stark's voice, from the other side. "The last of the materials came through."
"Alright." Axiros rose and opened the door.
The man standing there looked hollowed out. Pale, eyes carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who had been running on hope alone for weeks and wasn't entirely sure the hope was solid. Those eyes wanted something simple — rest, peace, the one thing that had been taken from him.
Axiros looked at him and felt nothing.
"I hope… I—" Stark started, his voice catching before the sentence could finish itself.
"You'll see her again," Axiros said, his expression doing exactly what it needed to do.
He shut the door after Stark left and stood in the quiet of the room for a moment.
Kael had gone back to the camp a few days prior, once he'd confirmed Axiros was settled. On his way out he'd left a Teraphira — a communication device, fast and secure enough that it was practically untraceable by anything short of the highest tier techniques. Since then, information had been coming through steadily. Camp details. Old One movements. Plans that were unfolding almost exactly as Axiros had expected them to.
'They would make excellent subordinates,' he thought, reading through the latest, 'if they had even the most basic capacity for rational thought. Unfortunate.'
He kept his thoughts contained. Stark's awareness blanketed the entire house, passive but constant. Speaking openly wasn't an option.
---
That night —
He stood in the open field behind the house, the sky dark and wide above him.
Around him, spread across the ground in a precise arrangement, were hundreds of materials. Varying affinities, varying rarity — some among the rarest things in the world, others completely common, each chosen for a specific function. Some fed energy into the structure. Others channeled laws directly. A handful were singular — the only ones of their kind left in existence.
At the center of the arrangement sat something particularly notable. The ground core of a high-ranked Aetherless Nihilborn, reduced to fine powder. Wrapped carefully in Chira — a material whose sole function was to contain the core's energy from detonating the instant it was touched. A technique known to very few people in this world.
That Stark had acquired all of this spoke for itself. The man had authority that stretched well beyond what his current situation suggested. He could, if he chose, end the Riquade war on his own. The resources he commanded were that significant.
Axiros had made full use of every last bit of that.
Stark stood at a distance, watching, ready to move if something went wrong.
"Uncle Stark," Axiros called out, keeping his voice even. "You should go back inside. The ones I'm dealing with won't allow any observers — not for something this close to a soul."
Half a lie. Stark wouldn't see anything, that much was true. But not because of the Archkeepers. Because Axiros was going to put up a barrier the moment he stepped away.
Within a few minutes he had arranged everything — hundreds of materials shifted into precise positions, forming the foundation of a high-tier spell design. A blueprint of technique, with the powdered core threaded through the gaps like a binding agent, holding the structure together.
One purpose. Not yet visible.
He moved to the exact center of the formation and sat down, crossing his legs beneath him. The field went quiet around him — no wind, no movement, just the faint hum of the materials beginning to interact with each other at the edges of the arrangement.
He closed his eyes and went inward.
Down through the layers of himself — past the surface, past the familiar architecture of his consciousness, down into the deeper territory where most things had no name. His soul space opened around him like a second world.
There it sat. A massive sphere of existential energy, vast and slow-moving, radiating a color that had no human reference point. He had drawn it from his existential seed over the past weeks, piece by piece, letting it accumulate here. It moved in endless, heavy currents through the space around it, the surrounding soul energy parting wherever it touched — feeble by comparison, swept aside without effort.
Existential energy was exactly what the name implied. The binding agent of everything — existence, nonexistence, the space between them. Its authority sat above almost anything accessible in the conventional sense. Although it was came short of energies from the deeper layers entirely, in theory, it was one of the most potent things a person could draw on.
In practice, it had almost no direct effect in the physical world. The world itself resisted it — constraints baked into the fabric of the place that prevented its open use. Forcing it through those constraints wouldn't just fail. It would be a catastrophe, and Axiros had no interest in dealing with that. Not yet, at least.
But certain techniques created a channel. A narrow, specific path through which existential energy could move into the real world without triggering what it otherwise would. Time-consuming to construct. Painstaking to execute correctly.
The ritual he was performing now was one of the simpler ones.
He reached into the sphere and drew.
The energy moved out of him slowly, threading down through his body and into the ground beneath him, spreading outward through the blueprint he had laid — following the lines of the design, filling the structure the way water fills a channel carved for it.
The formation blazed to life.
Light poured out of it — fierce, almost violent — as the existential energy moved through the blueprint and locked each material to the next, one connection after another snapping into place with the finality of things that were never meant to come apart. The field lit up in pulses, each one stronger than the last.
Fifteen minutes. Then it stilled.
Every material bound. The entire structure alive, stable, humming with a coherence that had no right to exist in a field behind a house on the outskirts of Metneris.
'Second phase.'
He shifted his concentration outward, spreading it across the formation, touching each material individually. Then, through the existential energy still flowing steadily from the sphere within, he began converting them — breaking each one down at the structural level, reducing them into dense balls of raw energy, attribute and all. The conversion was clean. Precise. The balls lifted from their positions and shot toward him.
The moment they hit, something almost catastrophic happened.
His body received them the way a void receives everything thrown into it — violently, completely, without resistance or limit. They didn't settle. They simply vanished into him, drawn down into something bottomless.
He directed portions deliberately — certain balls toward his eyes, the ones carrying attributes he had specific use for. The rest he spread through the body methodically, pushing enhancement into tissue and bone and everything beneath.
A few he sent directly toward his heart. Technically unnecessary for what he was about to do next. But certainty had its own value.
He reached inward again with what remained of the existential energy and began imprinting. A technique, pressed into the structure of his eyes at the foundational level, threaded through with the merged energy of the materials he'd chosen for it. It took a few minutes. Then it was done.
The energy moved into his eyes.
Something shifted there — deep, irreversible, the kind of change that didn't announce itself loudly but remade the thing it touched completely. A phenomenon this world had never produced before, quietly occurring in an empty field in the middle of the night.
'My eyes are opening again,' he thought, and laughed internally with a satisfaction that had been a long time coming.
The field was empty.
Every material — hundreds of them, some singular, some irreplaceable — gone. Not scattered, not consumed in any visible sense. Just absent, as though they had never been arranged across the grass at all. All of it pulled into Axiros and his apparently bottomless body without complaint.
'Damn,' he thought, looking down at his hands. 'This body is insane.'
He exhaled slowly.
'Time to acquire the next pawn.'
He pressed the tip of one finger against his thumb and pushed until blood came — dark, slow, already instilled with the energy running through him now. He crouched down and began to draw.
The Hell's Summoning Circle took shape on the ground beneath his hands, line by line, his blood tracing each curve and angle as his body tried to close the wounds and he quietly refused to let it.
A simple principle, if you knew it — fake your death convincingly enough to fool cosmic authority, and it would route a fragment of your soul downward. You had six hundred and sixty six minutes before revival pulled you back.
He finished. Straightened up.
And spoke.
"Beneath the breath of a dying flame,
Where silence gnaws on the bones of night,
I carve the name no tongue should claim
Into the ribs of fading light.
Ash on my hands, blood on the stone,
Circles drawn where shadows kneel.
I speak the words not meant to be known,
Words the buried stars conceal.
Let the world grow thin and hollow,
Let mercy drown in crimson breath.
For I have called what none should follow —
The quiet architect of death."
The world went dark.
Not gradually. All at once — light pulling back from everything like a tide going out in a single breath. The field, the house, the sky above — all of it receding into black.
And then something small and cold and precise detached from within him. A fragment of his soul, barely a sliver, cast downward into the dark. The technique was able to cast an extremely minute past of his soul, such a small part that he wouldn't even notice it would be missing. The technique did not have further strength to do so.
His soul was too vast, and ancient.
The rest of him stayed exactly where he was. "Let's hope, 'little me' will succeed." Axiros sighed.