Zapharos
The summons struck like a blade of light through my mind—blinding, merciless, impossible to ignore.
Pain flared behind my eyes as the command pulsed through my skull; the voices of my brothers crashed through the walls of my mind.
I clenched my teeth, fighting the invasion, but there was no resisting the call of the Hall.
The harder I pushed them out, the deeper their demand sank until resistance became agony.
Korvath looked up from the war map, his amber eyes narrowing. “Everything all right?”
“No,” I ground out. “The Hall commands my presence.”
His aura flared, deep brown streaked with black frustration. “Now? The battle begins in a heartbeat.”
“I must go,” I said, already feeling the drag of their collective pull. “You’ll take command.”
Korvath inclined his head, though his voice carried the bitterness we both shared. “Do they even know what we do here?”
“They know,” I replied, my jaw tightening. “They just don’t value it.”
His snarl followed me as the world around me dissolved.
A single heartbeat later, I stood within the Hall of Seven.
Tension seeped from every seam of my armor like molten ichor.
Outside, the war pressed in on me from a billion fronts—a symphony of dying stars and shattering continents—yet here I stood, bound by rites older than this fading cosmos.
The others could never grasp what they’d summoned me from: they fancied war a game of titans, a mere chess match.
They underestimated it. We were on the brink of a storm that might uproot our entire future, and I’d been forced to leave my armies half-formed, floundering, so my brothers and I could argue while darkness gnawed at our heels.
Six pairs of eyes bored into me, black burning orbs—gateways to infernos and frozen voids—each reflecting a different facet of power. They pinned me in place like spikes.
Thyros halted his pacing the moment I entered; his crimson-and-gold aura, the hues of ancient suns, flared as if to ignite the very stone. He fixed me with a look sharp enough to cleave marble.
“You kept us waiting,” he growled, his voice grated like steel on stone. “While the Abyss hungers, you stroll in as if we’re your servants.”
I tried to let the barb slide across my temper, but the unending demands of war stoked my fury as much as Thyros’ pretentiousness. I would not give him the pretense of politeness this time.
“The Abyss?” I echoed, sweeping my gaze around the obsidian table where six demigods hovered like loaded blasters. “The Abyss? Is that why you called me here?” My head swiveled from one to the other. “By the drekken eclipse, you dragged me from a warfront because the Dark Abyss feeds?”
Thyros snorted in dismissal. “Always another battle, brother. To you, they blur like drops of blood in an ocean. What matters is what we decide here.”
A black aura, the shade of dried blood—my only honest color—crackled around me in strobing flashes against Thyros’ fire. “Those drops of blood are the only things holding the Mmuhr’Rhong back from devouring us all.”
A deep voice from the shadows mocked, “Careful, Praetor,” Dravok warned, slipping in my title to sting. “If even the great Zapharos quakes, what faith can your legions hold?”
I met his derisive gaze without a flicker of amusement.
He never used my title of Praetor unless to torment me.
I stepped deeper into the hall; the air grew heavier, charged by my anger.
Thyros and Dravok shifted in unison, warping the room’s balance toward violence.
Beneath us, the ancient stones hummed with the promise of catastrophe.
“Enough.” Vaelion’s voice cracked through the mounting tension like an alarm bell. His white-gold light steadied the room. “We’ll bring down the Hall before we remember why we’re here.”
From the far side, Nythor laughed—a sound too thin, too eager. “Oh, let him burn. Blood spilled here would make legend.”
“Sit,” Vaelion ordered quietly. His voice held weight enough to still even Nythor. “This isn’t about pride. Rotodex falls today. It’s your turn, Zapharos.”
My temper snapped. “My turn?” The words came out in a snarl. “Do any of you understand what I carry? The Mmuhr’Rhong don’t die; they linger. They whisper through the blood of every fallen Arkhevari while you debate semantics like priests.”
Selkaris raised his gaze, his expression calm, his voice quiet enough to silence the storm.
His face was a palimpsest of eons, every line written and rewritten by memory.
“Better your shattered bones than the silence of oblivion,” he said.
“If Rotodex falls unkept, its memory vanishes with it. We swore to bear witness.”
I held his gaze. The anger burned, but reason flickered beneath it.
He was right. He always was. The seven of us took turns bearing witness to the death of billions of beings on any world that was unlucky enough to enter the Dark Abyss' path. If neither my brothers nor I paid witness, the Mmuhr’Rhong would come and feed on the misery and death of Rotodex, and it would grow their numbers in perpetuity.
They already had the advantage of the larger count.
They grew in numbers with every heartbeat, while ours dwindled to nothing.
“I will go,” I said at last, my voice flat as forged iron.
Outside, the war waited. So did the end.
I was doomed to play witness bearer once again to a world condemned to be the Dark Abyss' next victim. Within a heartbeat, Nox Eternum yawned before me, endless and hungering, its horizon a roiling lip of nothingness where even the Arkhevari light bent and vanished. The maw’s pull gnawed at my aura, dragging it into fine, electric threads that snapped and spat along the perimeter.
I hung suspended at the edge, where the oldest stars had long been devoured and time itself bled thin as water.
For mortals, oblivion would have been instant, their souls torn and atomized before their bodies even perished, scattered like chaff across a windless waste.
For me, it was just another day at the rim of annihilation, another round in the ritual deathmatch between brotherhood, hunger, and the will to survive.
Rotodex, the condemned world, drifted closer, unable to resist the event horizon’s inexorable drag.
Its surface shone faintly against the void, a pale blue ring around an orange core, still clinging to the memory of sunlight.
I glimpsed its mountains and rivers, the tangled web of forest and city lights—every living thing, every hope or horror, pouring headlong toward the dark.
Ready to be devoured and claimed by the Mmuhr’Rhong, those ghouls of the deep who waited for the lost and the damned.
I could almost feel their anticipation, just out of sight but nearby, hoping for scrapes.
My brothers viewed this as a sacred duty—an honor.
To them, the voices that rose from every soon-to-die world were a hymn, proof that we were needed, that the universe cared enough to assign us a purpose.
But I knew better. I heard the voices as they truly were: no chorus, only a cacophony, a tide of panic and grief and all the unfinished business of the dead.
They didn’t uplift, they dragged us down, buried us beneath centuries of regret, until even the strongest of us staggered under the weight.
I doubted my brothers loved this part, but they wore the mask better than I ever could.
I hated it, loathed it, and yet here I was again, condemned by the Council to be the one who took it all in.
I flexed my hands, cracked my neck, tried to roll the ghosts out of my shoulders.
It didn’t help. Already, the edge of Rotodex’s history was scraping against my mind, bleeding into my bones.
Wars, millions of them, layered like sediment.
Loves, each one bright and brief as a fuse.
The everyday stink of desperation in the backstreets.
It would all be mine soon, whether I wished it or not, and it was always the same: a burden, a shroud, another layer of history I’d never asked for.
I’d seen more than a mind could dream. I’d carried it until I could barely remember the taste of my own memories.
Each new world became another link in the chain, binding us to the old law: when a planet fell to Nox Eternum, one of us had to take its legacy in.
Otherwise, the Mmuhr’Rhong would seize it and twist every soul and thought into a weapon for their endless war against the realms of Auris Prime—the outside world.
The universe that the Arkhevari once had been the masters of.
Voices rose inside me, countless voices, more than a quadruple of trillions, all the souls through time and space I had—against my will—collected.
I pulled my lips back in a grimace meant to pass for a smile.
“Not today,” I muttered, and the echo vanished instantly into the endless dark shelf I had created inside my mind, the one I kept tightly under lock at all times.
For one moment, I allowed myself to think—hope—that if what they said about an Aelyth was true, maybe I could finally face my demons and find peace again.
With a breath I didn’t need, I steadied myself.
My aura burned red, indicating my internal agitation.
Once it had been golden, now I settled for red, keeping at bay the black that always tried to claw its way to the front, to erase anything still good in me.
The red cast a blood glow across the black as Rotodex spun ever closer.
I reached out, ready to absorb its epoch, to let it burn through me, to curse it but shoulder it all the same.
That was how it always went. But this time, as the planet crossed the threshold and I braced for the scream of a billion souls at once, the terror and disbelief of an entire species facing extinction, I heard almost nothing.
Not silence, but a soft murmur, a whisper so faint it barely registered.
Not a planet’s death rattle, but something quieter.
The pull was wrong. The flavor of it was wrong. What pressed against my aura wasn’t just the weight of history, or the drag of memory. There was something else beneath, tighter and more immediate. A vibration. A pulse. In all my millennia, nothing had ever felt like this.
It was alive.
For the first time in an eternity, I hesitated. My instinct recoiled, my muscles and mind locked up against the incomprehensible. I wasn’t encountering a dead world’s artifact, some lingering ghost from millennia ago. This was now. This was real.
The flood hit me, but instead of the cold, sterile wail of the past, it was heat—immediate, hungry, unrelenting.
Histories collided and clung, but at the center was a presence, a single point of pressure in the whirl of entropy.
I reeled back, my aura flaring, the red now streaked with a color I hadn’t seen since the beginning: gold, pure and unsullied.
It was anathema to everything in the void. It hurt.
A heartbeat. Not metaphorical, not the poetic thud of some ancient myth, but an actual throb, repeated and strong. It was threading its way through the collapse of Rotodex and straight into my chest. I staggered in the dark, choking on what passed for breath.
“What in the abyss—” I tried to speak, but the words barely came.
She was there. Not a fragment. Not a figment.
A living being, a mind and soul intact, clinging to the planet’s core even as the edges shredded away.
A female—at least, that was how the signal resolved, though her shape flickered and changed with each beat.
She was fragile. Entirely alone. Yet she burned.
Not like a star, not like the wildfires of war, but with something softer, finer.
Balance. Harmony. The one force I hadn’t touched in longer than I could recall.
It was impossible. Our fathers had declared our Aelyth lost, untraceable, scattered among the drowned worlds.
They were just stories to comfort us. But now I felt it, the bond as real as the one that had been cut from me eons in the past. I was tethered to her, dragged toward her like a blade snapped to a magnet.
A different fury rose in me. Fate was mocking me, dangling what I’d been denied for uncountable ages, only here, now, where nothing could come of it but more pain. The word seared itself through my brain, a brand hotter than any rage.
Aelyth.
I snarled, but the void stole the sound.
My aura shuddered, already rippling with colors I’d forgotten existed, and in that instant, all my careful self-control shattered.
I lunged toward the presence, unwilling to let go, unwilling to surrender.
My aura sounded a clarion against the black, slicing forward with predatory intent.
I wasn’t grateful. I wasn’t relieved.
I was angry.
Because she made me feel.
Longing. Want. Hope.
Emotions that the millennia-long war had carved out of me now teased at the edges of what was left of my heart.
They taunted me, cruel reminders of everything I’d been trained to bury.
Because there was no greater torment for a warrior than to feel again—only to be denied the right to let those feelings live.
I wasn’t afraid they would destroy me.
I was afraid of what my destruction would mean for those who still followed me.