Chapter 9 DRAVOK #2
Because the moment I withdrew fully into my own consciousness, something else slipped through. A pressure. Zapharos' and my connection was still too fresh. I felt a rush through him; his Aelyth was calling to him. And beneath it, one name: Ashera.
A name so old, it had been forgotten, buried.
I didn't think I would ever hear it again.
With my curiosity aroused, I turned without conscious decision, letting the ship's systems fade from relevance as I followed the same pull Zapharos felt sideways rather than forward.
I did not tear through space. I did not summon power I no longer possessed—outside Nox Eternum, I couldn't simply teleport as I did inside—my hull stayed behind, while my mind tore through time and space.
It arrived at the Hall of Knowledge, a place filled with memory pools.
Not just information, but history. The kind that clings to stone and breath and silence long after words fade.
Shadows linger longer than they should. Truth echoes even when no one wants it to.
It seemed almost natural that the pull would take me there.
I let myself narrow along the seam between presence and absence, collapsing my observable state while keeping my awareness intact.
What remained of me on the ship was my body, a husk.
What appeared in the Hall of Knowledge was nothing more than a deepening of darkness between pillars.
Time, in such places, did not behave as mortals believed it did.
It was not a line progressing forward. It was a field, layered, compressible, capable of overlap.
Moments did not vanish when they passed.
They settled. From within the echo, I was not bound to sequence.
I was anchored to convergence. Zapharos was not there yet.
Which meant the Aelyth bond call had not been triggered. Curious.
I adjusted my awareness slightly, testing the temporal alignment. The resonance was precise, positioned at the edge of inevitability. Not after. Not during. Before.
Whatever force had drawn my attention here had not wanted me to witness the bond itself. It wanted me to see the moment preceding it. The unaltered state. The variables before interference. That realization did not comfort me. It meant this was not a coincidence. It meant I had been placed.
From my spot in the shadows, I observed Ella—Zapharos' Aelyth—and Selkaris, Arbiter of Memory, staring at a stone in Ella's hand.
The instant her fingers brushed its surface, I felt the activation ripple outward.
The artifact woke like a wound remembering how to bleed.
The air shifted. The Living Veil stirred.
The stone did not speak in sound, but in weight.
It warmed in her hands. Fog rose out of the rock like breath in winter, coiling into a slender column that hovered at eye level.
Selkaris straightened, the light from his console washed off his face as the fog turned from gray to starless black shot through with embers.
A voice followed the smoke or, possibly, swirled within it; it was hard to tell.
It was deep and old. Not spoken so much as remembered.
"When the first worlds fell, their fire had no river.
All that lived bled into the wound. The wound learned to hunger. "
My skin prickled. I had heard this story before. Not in a long time, but that's how it always began. The fog swirled, forming the rough impression of a map, rings curled inward toward a dark heart. Replicating the Dark Abyss.
"Centuries upon centuries, light without source pooled in Nox Eternum, filled it with knowledge, energy, and tragedy. But what devours, learns. What gathers, awakens. Deep in the hollows between dying worlds and stars, a will took shape. We named it Nhal'Vareth."
Selkaris's head snapped toward Ella. His lips shaped the word silently—Nhal'Vareth—like it might bite.
The voice went on, uncaring about its audience or their feelings.
"Not mind. Not soul. But will. It drank heat, and then thought, and then breathed.
Those who drifted close felt the pull to look, to know, to enter.
Then came the first Arkhevari, to stare into the wound that calls.
" The fog flexed. For a heartbeat, it suggested figures haloed in light, standing on the edge of an endless black sea.
"Then another and another. They all succumbed to its lure, to its promise of endless knowledge. All but one."
A figure broke away from the others, smaller against the dark, hand linked to a second shape wreathed in soft glow.
"He turned and, with his Aelyth, fled the call. Their names were written once and then erased: Caelor and Ashera. They vanished into the living veil. Never to be heard from or seen again."
Ella's body went still. Enough so for Selkaris to inquire in alarm, "Ella?"
That's when, out of nowhere, as if he had felt her discomfort, Zapharos emerged.
"What is it? Ella?" He pulled her into his arms and snarled at Selkaris, "What did you do to her?"
"Nothing. He did nothing." Ella placed a soothing hand on his arm, and I watched in fascination as Zapharos' aura turned from black to red.
Zapharos' temper was famous, and once his aura turned black, there was usually no stopping him until blood flowed, a lot of blood.
Interesting. Was this what an Aelyth did to us? Controlled our emotions?
Before I could mull this over more, Ella announced that name again.
"Ashera. She is mentioned in Earth's history.
Well, someone with just about the same name is.
She was… a goddess, a very old goddess, a mother goddess.
The wife of El…" She broke off and looked confused for a moment, the rock shivered, and the fog pulled back into the stone with a soft hiss, as if the rock had exhaled for the first time in ages.
The hall's normal sounds crept back in the low thrum of the archives, the faint chime of Selkaris' console.
Zapharos put a protective arm around Ella as she continued, "On Earth, Ashera was erased, scrubbed out of scriptures, turned into an idol instead of…
instead of what she was, a goddess. But there are fragments, inscriptions that say Yahweh and his Asherah.
And El—El is one of our oldest words for god.
" She turned from one to the other, but none of them saw me.
"What if Caelor became El? What if Ashera… is Asherah?"
Selkaris didn't breathe for a few heartbeats.
Then his eyes lit like they hadn't in a long, very long time.
"Names erode," he murmured, almost to himself.
"Stones keep their bones; tongues keep their breath.
Caelor to El. Ashera to Asherah." His gaze found Ella's.
"Your world remembered them, even as it forgot. "
Zapharos brushed a knuckle along Ella's cheek, reminding me of how I had caressed Nadine's earlier. Remembering how soft her skin had felt.
"If these are your first seeders," Selkaris mused, "then Earth is not an accident. It is a sanctuary."
Ella shuddered, "A sanctuary planted by runaways. By the ones who refused the Abyss."
Selkaris moved with sudden purpose, palms sweeping across the console.
Glyphs rose and rearranged, a star-map peeled open like a flower.
"If they fled into the living veil, there will be residue," he said.
"Bent routes. Quiet lanes. Places where memory thins.
You and I will chase their wake through archives and artifacts.
We will test your Earth stories against our broken songs. "
Zapharos' voice was thick with emotion, "You will not do it alone. While you hunt their path, I will prepare the others."
What I did next was dangerous. There are limits to how far an Arkhevari mind can extend without consequence.
If my awareness locked fully into this place, my body would remain behind—breathing, intact, and empty—while my mind became a permanent fixture of Nox Eternum.
A prisoner. I understood the risk. Yet I stepped forward, allowing my presence to resolve.
To the others, it would look no different than if I stood there in flesh and bone.
"Good," I announced, "Chase your saints through dust and lullabies." I stepped away from the pillar. "I will chase the ones who profit from forgetting. The Ohrur keep ledgers longer than their consciences. Somewhere in their accounts, there will be a mention of us."
Zapharos' eyes narrowed at me. "I thought you were hunting Nythor."
"If he is still Nythor to hunt," I replied darkly. Who knew what had become of our Oracle? Each time he made contact with me, he sounded more… deranged than the last.
I wanted to keep abreast of what Selkaris and Ella were finding, and turned to Ella, "When your myths point to a door, little historian, send for me. I prefer to open such things from the inside." I paused, "Tell me something, little historian."
She blinked. "What?"
"Human females." I resigned myself to ask. "Are they all as… defiant as you?"
Zapharos stiffened beside me, a low rumble curled up from his chest in warning. "Careful."
Normally, I would have enjoyed enraging him further, but my time was short.
I could already feel the shadows closing in, not as pursuit, but as consolidation.
Nox Eternum does not hold visitors. It absorbs them.
The longer a conscious mind remains partially anchored within it, the more insistently the Abyss asserts coherence.
What begins as observation becomes residence.
What begins as presence becomes classification.
I had entered through a narrowing window, a temporary allowance, sustained only by deliberate withdrawal.
Once it sealed, there would be no return. I had to disengage now, before the tether collapsed completely. Before I left Nadine alone aboard the ship, with nothing but an empty husk for company.
"Relax, Praetor. I've already found mine." I tilted my head with the truth of my words. A statement I hadn't even allowed myself to acknowledge yet. But seeing Ella and Zapharos... it clarified things, not that I liked what I saw. "She just hasn't accepted it yet."
Ella asked, "She's human?"
"Oh, she's something." I nodded. "Stubborn. Infuriating. Soft in ways that make you forget the war outside your ribs. You'll like her, little historian, if she doesn't stab me first."
Selkaris hid a smile behind his hand. I looked Zapharos' human up and down, and something inside me softened.
"Your kind has teeth. I like that." Then to Zapharos, because even though I wasn't sure yet, a suspicion was growing inside me that the Abyss wouldn't like us finding our Aelyth.
"Keep her close, brother. The dark eats more than it swallows these days. "
The shadows thickened around me, tugging insistently. The window was closing.
The stone had pulled me because it remembered me. Not as a god, not as a weapon, but as a witness. I had walked the swallowed worlds. I had catalogued their last truths. Where my brothers felt reverberation, I felt recognition. That was the difference.
Zapharos felt the flare of danger. Selkaris felt the awakening of memory.
The others felt only unease. I felt the hook because I hunt what is erased.
Because I listen where silence is manufactured.
Because when something forbidden remembers how to speak, it speaks first to those who have survived hearing it before.
The Hall of Knowledge allowed me passage not because I was powerful, but because it was already fractured. I stepped where something had been broken long before I arrived. Now the seam narrowed.
I let the shadows take me, folding back along the same echo I had used to enter, careful not to linger.
The Hall faded. Stone became memory. Memory became distance.
And with a final, reluctant pull, the window sealed behind me, leaving Nox Eternum, the stone, and the first true confirmation of what hunted us all safely out of reach.
For now.