Chapter 36 Nadine #2
Dravok sent a smile at me before Selkaris gestured toward a tall, rigid figure whose aura burned white-gold at the edges.
"Vaelion. Sentinel of the Luminis Verge.
" Vaelion stood like a living bastion, disciplined and immovable.
"He anchors the veil," Selkaris explained.
"Where Auris Prime ends, and the Black Abyss begins. "
Another turn. "Ozyrael. Herald of Dawn." Ozyrael's presence felt different, lighter, warmer, and more persuasive rather than oppressive. I could feel how easily his voice could bend a room, how words in his mouth became instruments of influence. "Diplomat. Emissary. Bridge between worlds."
Then Selkaris paused. "One seat stands empty.
" The absence hit harder than any presence could have.
"Nythor. Oracle of the Abyss. Seer of fractures.
" Silence pressed in from all sides as everyone accepted Nythor's loss.
No embellishment. No ritual softening. Just truth.
Selkaris let that settle before continuing.
"And now, those who stand among us by bond rather than birth.
" His gaze shifted to Ella. "Ella," Selkaris introduced. "Human. Bound to Zapharos."
Ella did not bow. She did not shrink. She met the Hall with quiet steadiness, her presence grounded in a way that felt almost defiant in its humanity. It was easy to see how she anchored Zapharos, how she balanced him.
Then Selkaris looked back to Dravok, who stepped forward, putting his arm around me in a proprietary way as if he wanted to shield me from the others.
"This," he said, his voice steady, carrying easily through the chamber, "is Nadine.
" Every gaze turned to me. "She is human," he continued.
"She stood against the darkness within me and did not break.
She named what we refused to see." Dravok's voice lowered, just enough to carry weight.
Selkaris studied me for a long moment. Then he inclined his head. "Then the Hall will listen."
The living stone beneath our feet glowed brighter. The introductions were complete.
"Now," Selkaris opened his arms in a wide circle, "we will speak of what hunts us from within the Abyss." His gaze sharpened. "Tell us what happened."
Dravok did. He didn't leave anything out.
He didn't soften the edges or dress the truth in honor or inevitability.
He spoke of the pull, the certainty the Darkness offered, the way it didn't feel foreign but familiar.
He spoke of how it had promised peace through eradication, clarity through violence.
When he reached the moment where his hands had closed around my throat, his voice faltered, just once.
His eyes sought and found Zapharos' in warning.
Zapharos did not look away. His golden aura dimmed in partial grief.
I felt it ripple outward, steady but heavy, as if he were holding the weight of Dravok's words inside himself, testing them against truths he had never allowed himself to articulate.
The Hall was utterly silent. No interruptions. No denial. The Arkhevari listened the way beings do when they recognize something they have spent too long avoiding.
"You're saying," Zapharos summarized at last, keeping his voice carefully neutral, "that what you fought was not the Abyss itself."
"No," Dravok replied. "It was something that knew me. Something that used my instincts against me, something inside of me. Inside all of us."
"And it needed you there," Thyros questioned, his tone sharp with sudden clarity. "On Cronack?"
"Yes," Dravok agreed. "It needed me unbalanced."
Selkaris folded his hands behind his back. "And Nadine."
Dravok's arm tightened slightly around me. "It did not anticipate her."
I felt every gaze turn again, heavier now.
"It recoiled," Dravok continued. "Our bond was stronger than the evil and hate it promises. The pressure it relied on could no longer close."
Selkaris' eyes narrowed fractionally. "You are suggesting that this entity—"
"The Harrowed One," Ella whispered.
Selkaris gave her a warning glance, sharp and immediate, but Ella did not retreat. She straightened instead, her human presence somehow steady amid the gathered weight of gods.
"It's time we share what we found," she implored the god.
She stepped forward, hands clasped in front of her, her voice calm but charged with urgency. "Selkaris and I searched the oldest archives," she filled us in. "Not the curated records. The fragments. The pieces that were never meant to survive translation."
Selkaris didn't look happy about Ella divulging this. But she continued, unafraid. "We found repeated references to two names," Ella continued. "Ashera and Caelor. Arkhevari that didn't join them when they entered the Abyss."
The other gods didn't show surprise or recognition.
To them, it was just a story; none of them understood its importance yet.
Not until Ella looked at me and continued.
I wasn't sure what she expected; she almost looked at me like the names should mean something to me.
"There are old, ancient stories on Earth referring to a mother and a father of all gods, their names are El and Asherah. "
A shiver moved down my spine. Now I understood her meaningful glance. "How ancient?" I asked.
Ella didn't answer right away. She glanced at Selkaris first, then back at me, as if gauging how much truth a human was meant to carry. She drew in a slow breath, as if the answer required care.
"The oldest surviving mentions," she explained, "date to the end of the last Ice Age. Roughly twelve to fourteen thousand years ago. Just after the great melt. Just after the seas rose and entire coastlines vanished."
The gods remained quiet; twelve to fourteen thousand years didn't mean anything to them, which only served to make my head spin faster, because… that was a lot of years for us humans, for me.
"But those records aren't written," Ella continued. "Not in any language we'd recognize. They're symbolic, etched stone, repeated motifs, oral fragments later absorbed into pre-Sumerian cultures."
"Pre-Sumerian," I echoed.
"Yes. Before cities. Before cuneiform. Before history learned how to keep itself tidy." Her gaze sharpened. "What survives are titles, not names. The Luminous One. The Dawn-Bearer. She Who Walks Between Stars."
I felt something click into place. "And the names?"
"They come later. Much later. As cultures fracture and memory degrades." She folded her hands. "Caelor becomes Il, Ilu, then simply El. Ashera fractures even more: Asherah, Astarte, Ishtar, Inanna. Her cosmic role stripped away, reduced to fertility, war, anything small enough to survive."
That sounded about right, for one reason or another, history had always tried to negate women's accomplishments. Tried to make them irrelevant.
"That doesn't happen by accident," Dravok picked up, and I felt a wave of love rush through me for him. He would never behold a woman as anything other than magical.
"No," Ella agreed. "It happens when knowledge becomes dangerous."
I had a hard time digesting her words, but I had to ask. "So you think there was… something before that."
The words tasted wrong in my mouth. Not false, just structurally unsound.
My mind resisted them the way it always had when faced with claims that threatened to upend established frameworks.
I wasn't a historian, but I believed in history.
In stratification. In timelines that built forward, not sideways.
Believed that what I'd been taught was part of the scaffolding that kept my thoughts ordered, measurable.
And yet.
That scaffolding had been bending for weeks now, since Dravok, since the Abyss, since I'd felt equations fail where resonance succeeded. Hell, in actuality, since the moment aliens invaded Earth.
I forced myself to continue. "You're saying there were other… civilizations. Before us. Before what we call the beginning."
Ella didn't hesitate. She nodded once. Simply. "Yes."
Something in my chest tightened, not fear, exactly, but vertigo. The sense that the ground beneath everything I'd ever assumed was quietly shifting.
"I wouldn't have believed that a few weeks ago," EIla admitted. "I would've dismissed it as myth layered over coincidence. Cognitive pattern-seeking."
My mouth curved, faint and knowing. "So would I."
Our eyes met, and something passed between us, not agreement, not certainty, but recognition. Two women trained to trust evidence, finding themselves standing in the space just beyond it, aware that understanding sometimes arrived before proof. I exhaled slowly.
"My mind is… adapting," I admitted, half to the hall, half to myself. "I don't know if that's progress or survival."
Ella's gaze softened. "Probably both."
Around us, gods debated the fate of worlds as they too started to realize Earth's significance.
But in that moment, it was just the two of us, Ella and me, standing at the edge of history as we thought we knew it, quietly acknowledging that the universe was far older, stranger, and less finished than either of us had ever been taught to imagine.
Ella met my gaze steadily. "There was a civilization that understood the stars.
That built in harmony with planetary cycles.
That knew something about thresholds and collapse.
" The gods stilled and listened again. "It didn't call them gods," Ella went on.
"It called them teachers. Guardians. Founders.
" She paused. "And then the world changed. "
"Changed how?" Thyros asked.
"Floods. Quakes. Fire. Submersion," Ella replied evenly. "Whatever knowledge wasn't deliberately erased was lost beneath the sea."