SEASON 3: THE QUEST FOR THE ARTIFACTS.
BY ANDREW SOLIS.
A Premonition:
The Hallway of the Dead Stars
The corridor stretched on forever, a ribcage of obsidian stone pulsing with faint violet light. Each step the five took echoed into the abyss — Talus, Lupus, Ungar, Dartmouth, and Barzakh — their shadows long and trembling across the warped walls. The air was heavy, thick with the scent of metal and something older than decay.
They had been running for what felt like hours. The only sound beyond their breath was the whisper of the hallway itself — a low, constant murmur, as though the stones remembered what had died here. "This place feels wrong," Talus muttered, glancing at the veins of light slithering along the floor. "Like it's breathing."
"It is," Barzakh replied, his tone calm, detached. "This whole structure was grown, not built. We're walking through the dream of something that never woke up." A vibration trembled underfoot — subtle at first, then rising like the heartbeat of the world. The walls shifted, bending slightly toward them as if to listen. "I hate this kind of place," Lupus growled, tightening his gauntlets. "Give me an army, a storm — not whatever this is."
Ungar's eyes gleamed. "Every battlefield is a nightmare in its own right, brother," he said. "You just prefer the ones you can blast into oblivion." They reached the end of the corridor and stumbled into a vast chamber that swallowed all light. The floor was a smooth, glass-like surface, reflecting their forms imperfectly — as if each reflection belonged to someone else.
In the center of the void hung a single column of fire, purple and blue, flickering without heat. And from the depths beneath it rose something colossal. A shape, first indistinct — then monstrous. Eyes bloomed like lanterns across its surface, hundreds, thousands of them, blinking in unison. Mouths formed and unformed, whispering prayers in languages that scraped the mind. Tendrils of flesh and starlight slithered upward, brushing the ceiling, dripping with black ichor that burned holes through the air itself. Dartmouth's voice cracked. "Is that… god?" Barzakh's eyes glowed faintly as he answered, "No. Clearly its like I once was. It's trying to become god." Then the chamber's light shifted. The column of fire flared white — and from its heart, a figure descended.
Hermes. She floated above the creature like judgment incarnate. Her dark hair rippled in the gravity of her own power, haloed by a soft, radiant fire. Her eyes, once kind, now burned with glacial calm. She looked down at them as if they were strangers she had already mourned. No one spoke at first. The silence was heavy, suffocating, broken only by the distant pulse of the monster's breathing.
"Why are you here?" Hermes asked finally, her voice even, almost sorrowful — yet sharpened by command.
Talus took a step forward, fists trembling. "Because you've gone too far. This— whatever you're doing— it's not who you are anymore. You're going to give your body to Volker. How could you Hermes?!" Hermes' expression didn't change. Her eyes darkened. "You think you understand me, Talus? You think your faith or your friendship can stop what's already been set in motion?" The air trembled. Cracks spidered across the glass floor. The very walls bent under the pressure of her presence.
"I'll give you one chance," she said. Her words were quiet, but they fell like thunder. "Turn back. If you try to stop me, I will kill you." Lupus stepped forward, his voice trembling with fury. "You've changed, Hermes. You sound just like the ones you swore to destroy. Tch… how pathetic, you've given in to the darkness honestly you really are a clown. At least now you have a chance to beat me. A chance. But you gave up your freedom and became a slave, not many can claim that." "I am what they feared I'd become," she said softly — and raised her hand. The Horrible beast stirred. Its eyes opened wide, and its mouths began to sing. The sound wasn't a roar, but a melody — something older than language, something that tore through the mind like glass.
"She's serious," Ungar said, his aura flickering. "That thing isn't separate from her. It's her shadow. No its like her arm." "The Prophet has become the enemy of God and the Light," Barzakh whispered. Talus looked up at her — the halo, the fire, the impossible calm — and his voice broke. "Hermes… please. Don't make us fight you." Her eyes softened for just a moment. Then she closed them. "You shouldn't have come here."
The creature's scream shattered the chamber. Gravity collapsed — the five were thrown back, sliding across the mirror-floor. Talus coughed blood as his spirit energy flickered. Hermes descended slowly through the chaos, her cloak billowing in divine light.
"I'm so tired of your shit. I have 600,000 Universes in my body and countless souls but you are by all means one of the worst I've come across by far, Hermes. Daniel and the others I tutored before were just fine. Imagine a god-like being who has lived countless lifetimes, lifetimes beyond comprehension, lifetimes beyond numbers or so-called limits. And even still you have worn out my patience. I've had it kid, I'm going to kill you. And I don't give a damn if we need you to stop the Void, you joined them anyway. I'm freaking done, you hear me. I'M DONNNEEE!!!!!!!!! I'm going to kill you right here, right now!!"
The words hung in the air like a detonator. For a heartbeat the Lovecraftian thing and Hermes both seemed to register the syllables as if they were a new kind of weather. The creature's many eyes focused on Ungar, black mirrors lighting with starlight and old grief. Hermes' face did not change; only the faintest twitch at the edge of one lip betrayed anything like feeling.
Talus felt the world tilt. He knew Ungar: the cold, patient force who catalogued universes like shells, who could swallow the scream of a dying star and still laugh at morning birds. Ungar did not rage. He catalogued fury. That he was shouting now meant the foundations beneath even his patience had cracked.
Lupus' hands flexed into claws. Dartmouth's mechanical wings whirred, a high anxious sound that fractured the chamber's heavy silence. Barzakh's eyes, always damp with distance, narrowed until they were thin slits of night.
Hermes looked down at Ungar. "You will be killed if you move," she said, voice like the hush after a bell. "I will not hesitate."
Ungar laughed, and it was the sound of tectonic plates grinding. He stepped forward — not toward Hermes but into his own center — and the air around him gathered like a storm. The runes on the walls reacted, blooming white then drowning into void-black. For every step Ungar took, a tiny galaxy unfurled and dissolved within his chest: spirals the color of old coins, nebulae like bruised silk, suns that winked out into nothing. Talus could feel them, like the pressure in his chest when someone speaks of home: infinite, impossible, unbearably heavy.
"Kill me?" Ungar said. "I will enjoy this." The old amusement in his voice had gone. What remained was something surgical, precise. He spread his arms and a rumble passed through the floor, through the glass mirror that reflected their faces back at them as masks. "You chose the Void, Hermes. You chose death's company over the breath that made you. There is no justification left that I can hear."
Hermes' halo flared; the beast beneath her inhaled. Tendrils curled toward Ungar like curious hands. The chamber thickened with expectation. Talus wanted to move, to put himself between Ungar and the Prophet-turned-storm, but something older had locked his limbs: the memory of doing exactly that once before, and the impossible cost of failing.
Ungar's aura spooled outwards — not light, but possibility: roads that never were, children who might have been, entire empires written and then crossed out in a single stroke. It pressed on their skulls with images of lives he could end like candles. Lupus clenched his jaw so tight a sliver of blood showed at his lip. Dartmouth's wings shuddered and made the sound of wind through ancient machine-bones.
"Hermes," Ungar said, and his voice dropped to a place Talus felt behind his ribs, a quiet that precluded jokes or pity. "I taught you better than cowardice. I taught you balance, and the names of the stars. You turned everything I gave you into a knife. So be it."
Hermes' eyes burned in a way that made Talus taste metal. "You are an animal of accumulation," she replied. "You hoard. You devour. You think your count of universes makes you judge. But even your mountains of worlds have no name in the ledger that counts truth."
Ungar smiled, little and ugly, like someone enjoying a particular, inevitable cruelty. Then his hands came together in one thunderous clap.
The sound detonated; the glass floor webbed cracks outward in fractal veins. The air between Ungar and Hermes condensed into a cylinder — a shaft of midnight that sucked light into it as if swallowing a candle. From Ungar's throat came a sound like a bell with a thousand tongues: a call to the universes he kept, and they answered. Stars imploded into pinpricks of light, then flared into a halo around him; every halo contained a memory: a child's first laugh, a crow's crooked song, the exact pattern of frost on an abandoned window. The halo rotated faster and faster until Talus felt it in his teeth.
The Lovecraftian entity reacted with a hunger that was almost religious. Its mouths opened, rows upon rows, singing those fractured prayers again. Hermes lifted both hands; the air between her palms gathered and whorled into a constellation of knives — hard, geometrical, impossible. She spoke, and her words seemed to separate the world into before and after.
"Ungar," Hermes said, and for the first time her voice cracked. "If this is also your choice, then come. Let the truth be finished."
Ungar's eyes became black hollows, and in them Talus saw not malice but a ledger being closed. "Fine," Ungar said. "Then let us write its last line."
Ungar moved. He did not sprint — he simply uncoiled the load of universes inside him and thrust them forward like a spear. The motion was not entirely physical; the space ahead of him folded into a corridor of possibility that opened directly into Hermes' chest. Tendrils from the beast lunged to intercept, but Ungar's spear-cut of potential severed them like silk. The creature yelped — a terrible, high sound that made the mirrors shiver and the runes bleed dark.
Talus launched himself after Ungar. Lupus followed, a comet of rage. Dartmouth banked, blades spinning from his wings. Barzakh, silent as a grave, followed with steps that never made a sound.
Hermes planted both feet and let power fall from the heavens through her. The knives she'd formed rose to meet Ungar's spear of unmade worlds. When they collided it was like two folding histories crashing — light and shadow braided in a scream that tugged at the edges of the chamber. For one dizzying instant the future tried to outrun the past and the past tried to swallow the future, and Talus felt the world shudder as if in response.
He found himself in the center of that collision, wind tearing at his clothes, the smell of ozone and the seared edge of stars in his nose. Ungar's face, inches from Hermes', was not triumphant. It was exhausted and, impossibly, terribly small.
"Do it," Ungar whispered — not to Hermes but to the empty air around them. "Do whatever you must. Finish it."
Hermes' eyes softened, a betrayal of all that coldness. For an instant — a fragile, luminous crack — Talus thought he saw the woman he'd followed like a map, the prophet who once stitched wounded cities together. The instant shattered like a glass bell.
Then the knives blazed. The spear flared. The chamber became a furnace of old galaxies and new grief. Talus had no time to be a bystander. He dove into the fray because not to act would be to consent to the ledger Ungar and Hermes were slamming shut — and because somewhere beneath all the screaming math, his heart would not allow him to watch two of the greatest forces he'd ever known reduce each other to silence without trying to stop it.
Episode 1: The Beginning…
The sun was a burning eye in the sky, watching over the desert. The banners of Yazid's army blotted out the horizon, a flood of steel and dust. Seventy-two men stood in its path — fathers, sons, brothers, friends. They shifted their feet in the sand, but none wavered. At their head stood Imam Husayn, his turban glowing white beneath the sun, his eyes carrying the calm of oceans and the fire of stars. He stepped forward, planting his staff in the ground. His voice rose, rolling across the plains, striking both his companions and his enemies like a wave.
"Brothers, sisters, warriors of truth — look at the horizon. Look at the storm of swords that comes to wash us away. It is vast, it is endless. And yet, this is the way of this world. Everything here passes: armies rise and armies fall, kings seize power and then are forgotten, mountains crumble into sand. This life is but a shadow — a fleeting dream, a passing cloud.
The Buddha of old spoke of impermanence; the sages of the East knew that all is change, all is flow. The Shinto priests spoke of the spirits that move through wind and tree, of duty before death. And we, as the heirs of the Messenger of God — we know that beyond all of this dust and impermanence stands the Most High, eternal, unchanging. And what do we face today? Yazid's army is not merely soldiers. It is the whisper of Shayṭān, the deceiver, who tells men that the weight of numbers is the measure of truth. Shayṭān tells them that fear of death outweighs the call of justice. He tells them that humiliation is easier than sacrifice, that comfort is sweeter than honor.
But we — we are not deceived. We see him for what he is." Husayn's voice sharpened like steel. "Did not the Prophet, my grandfather, teach us that truth is heavier than the mountains? Did he not teach us that a single man who stands for God outweighs the armies of tyrants? Today, we carry that legacy. Not in palaces, not in treasures, not in thrones — but in hearts that do not bow. I tell you this: The Messenger's path was never the path of ease. It was the path of the storm. When Quraysh mocked him, he endured. When the tribes raised their armies, he stood firm. When the world pressed against him, he broke it like stone breaks the wave. He passed that trust to my father, ʿAlī, the Lion of God, who never fled the battlefield, who never turned from justice. And now — that trust has come to us. We do not fight for land, nor for wealth, nor for power. We fight because the line of the Prophet must not end in submission to falsehood. We fight because Shayṭān must not claim this day as his victory."
Husayn turned, meeting the eyes of each of his seventy-two. "You may look upon their banners and think: We are few. There are many. But look again! What is seventy-two, if each heart burns with the fire of truth? A single candle can light a thousand more, and its flame is never diminished. If one spirit awakens to justice, the whole world is changed.
Do not fear death. Death is but a door — it is but the veil that parts this world from the eternal. The Prophet told us: 'This life is a prison for the believer and a paradise for the unbeliever.' What is death, then, but freedom? To die with honor is to break every chain. To live in humiliation is to remain a prisoner forever."
His voice rose, carrying like a war-drum.
"Let them come with ten thousand! Let them come with a hundred thousand! We will not bow to Yazid, we will not sell our souls to Shayṭān. Better to fall as lions in the desert than to crawl as slaves in palaces.
Brothers — today we fight not as seventy-two, but as the living breath of the Prophet himself! His prayer lives in us. His mercy shines through us. His defiance of tyranny burns within us. Let the world know — Husayn, the son of ʿAlī, the grandson of Muhammad, did not bow to oppression! Let the world know — seventy-two hearts carried the banner of truth when the world was drowned in lies!"
He raised his sword high, the sun glinting off its edge, his voice breaking into a final cry:
"Rise with me! If we must fall, let us fall as martyrs! If we must die, let us die standing! For the Messenger! For justice! For God Almighty - Exalted - Be - He over all of His Creatures and His Creation! Here in Karbala — we will write our names in eternity!"
The seventy-two roared as one, a sound that shook the earth. Spears slammed into the ground, swords raised high. Against the endless tide, they stood — not an army, but a legend.
Season 3: The Endless Voyage of Umi
When Hermes entered Umi, she stepped into a place without measure. Oceans larger than creation itself spread before her, stars drifted like plankton, and entire civilizations lay buried within reefs of memory. For every year outside, a hundred years passed within Umi's currents. By the time she returned, ten years older in the body, she would have lived one thousand years within its tides.
The Spirit Blade hummed in her hands, incomplete yet restless. In Umi she discovered that its true power had been shattered into artifacts — fragments of ancient Names, each holding a memory of what the Blade once was.
Across a thousand years, Hermes gathered nine hundred of these artifacts. Some were strange and terrible, others beautiful beyond comprehension:
The Pearl of Ten Thousand Eyes, a jewel that let her glimpse every possibility of a soul's fate.
The Atlantean Needle, a compass that did not point north but to the nearest truth.
The Dream-Fang of Zhuriel, a tooth torn from the maw of a god-serpent, still dripping with venom that burned through reality.
The Lantern of Forgotten Stars, a lamp that illuminated not places but times, shining light on histories that never happened.
The Bell of Thalassor, which, when rung, summoned the echoes of drowned civilizations to fight by her side.
The Glass Heart, clear and fragile, beating with the rhythm of an entire galaxy's life.
Each artifact sank into the Spirit Blade, strengthening it, reshaping it, completing it piece by piece. Yet the more Hermes gathered, the more she saw: this was only the beginning. Umi held not hundreds, but millions of such relics, scattered across depths she could never fully traverse.
The Vast Field
One of her greatest trials came after centuries of wandering, when she reached the Field of Stillness — a plain that stretched farther than any star-map, a barren meadow where every blade of grass was carved from glass. For three years she walked its expanse beneath a sky that did not move, her footsteps echoing like thunder. At its center she found not an artifact, but a throne of living stone. Upon it waited one of the Guardians of Umi — beings the sailors of old whispered of as the Old Gods, exiled when creation was young. This Guardian was colossal, its form shifting between beast and man, coral and bone, storm and silence. Its voice was the sound of tides crushing mountains.
"Little prophet," it said, "you carry the Blade that once defied us. To take what you seek, you must prove yourself against the weight of eternity."
Hermes did not raise her weapon immediately. She stood beneath its shadow, the Spirit Blade trembling, heavy now with hundreds of artifacts. She knew the battle before her was not merely strength against strength, but memory against eternity. That confrontation marked the turning point of her odyssey. The Guardians were not obstacles alone, but keepers of secrets that even the Blade did not remember.
The Truth of the Journey
By the end of her thousand years, Hermes had bound nine hundred artifacts into the Spirit Blade. Its edge sang with memory, truth, and fire. But Umi whispered still: these were only fragments, only the tip of an iceberg vaster than universes. For every relic she carried, thousands more remained hidden in depths untouched. Hermes returned to the outer world changed. Ten years had passed, but she bore the weight of a millennium. The Spirit Blade pulsed with the strength of 900 Names, yet its hunger was unending, its song incomplete. What she found in Umi was not a conclusion. It was the opening movement of a story that would stretch across eternity.
The First Artifact of Umi
The realm of Umi opened before Hermes like a wound in the fabric of reality. The currents sang in voices she did not know, stars churned like drifting embers in water, and her footsteps left ripples across a floor that was neither sea nor land. The Spirit Blade quivered in her grip. Incomplete, restless. Its faint hum pulled her forward, guiding her like a compass toward something hidden beneath the tides. She followed for days — or perhaps months, for time had already begun to bend — until she reached a canyon of coral towers, each the size of mountains, glowing faintly with inner fire. There, waiting at the canyon's heart, was the Coral Flame.
It was not an object in any ordinary sense. It burned inside a fossilized shell, a fire that did not consume but endured — an ember carried from before creation. The water around it boiled yet froze at once. Even the leviathans that circled the canyon kept their distance, hissing at the flame as though it were their ancestor and their executioner both.
Hermes approached. The Blade shuddered, desperate. Yet as she neared the Flame, a voice rose from the canyon, old and booming:
"To touch this ember is to carry the memory of drowned gods. Will you bear their silence, prophet?"
Hermes did not answer in words. She knelt before the Flame, placed the Spirit Blade upon the shell, and allowed the ember to sink into its heart. The Blade ignited. For the first time it pulsed with living heat, a red glow like a heartbeat remembering itself. Hermes staggered, her veins searing with alien fire. She saw visions of temples lost beneath black waters, of priests drowning mid-prayer, of gods silenced in their shrines. The Coral Flame carried their memory, and now she bore it as well. When the vision passed, Hermes stood taller. The Spirit Blade was heavier, warmer, and alive in her hands. It had begun its long road toward completion.
This was the first artifact, the first step of her thousand-year odyssey. Everything that followed — the hundreds of relics, the vast fields, the Guardians — would only echo this beginning. And though she did not yet know it, the Coral Flame was a seed of the larger truth: the Blade would never be just a weapon. It would be a chronicle of worlds forgotten, a living archive of creation's broken past.
Several Months after Talus is saved the Mystery on the Train:
The table shook with the rhythm of the train, bowls clattering as steam from hot dishes curled upward like banners of war. Talus was already halfway through his third plate, noodles dangling from his grin. Lupus gnawed clean through a hunk of roasted beast, while Gearling handed out cups with cheerful clanks of brass and steel. At the far end sat Ungar. His body caught the lantern-light, metal plates dull but unyielding. Where others' mouths moved with laughter and food, his face remained expressionless, sculpted iron without lips. The bowls before him stayed untouched, reflecting his silent form like mirrors.
Detective Beaver squinted, flipping open his notepad with a snap. "Hmph. Not a crumb touched. Not a drop spilled. A metal face with no lips, no tongue—so tell me, what are you, stranger?" Ungar turned his head slowly, the movement grinding like gears. His voice came out deep and resonant, forged from his chest rather than his mouth:
"I am not built to eat." Blaze leaned forward, fire dancing on his knuckles. "Then what do you survive on, tin man? Don't tell me it's friendship." Talus laughed so hard broth shot from his nose. "Pfft—yeah, right! This guy? Friendship?" Ungar's gaze shifted, unreadable in the glow of the lanterns. "I survive on will. I endure on silence. I consume what others discard: doubt, despair, the cracks in the world. That is my sustenance." For a moment, the table went quiet, save for the hum of the train and the scrape of metal joints shifting in Ungar's arms. Lotus watched him carefully, her spoon hovering midair. "Then you are not empty," she said softly. "Only full of something else."
The inspector's tail slapped against the seat. Whap. "Not eating, feeding on despair, metal for skin… suspicious doesn't even begin to cover it." He jotted furiously into his notebook. Talus raised a dumpling triumphantly, breaking the tension with a grin. "Fine by me! More food for the rest of us." The table erupted again in laughter and noise, but Ungar's stillness lingered like a shadow at the edge of the firelight—strange, unyielding, and utterly unreadable.
15 years prior, Back on Planet Krook:
A powerful warlord stood on the battlefield a warrior named Qatar. A large bear with powerful armor. "Come out, warrior, I've had enough waiting around for you."