In the periphery of Duskholm.
A spirit moved.
She glided steadily through the dusky skies, her form ethereal and fluid, dancing with the soft wind that rustled the dying grass beneath her.
The air here held a strange scent—faintly floral, faintly decayed. It clung to her essence like faded perfu on parchnt.
Leiruat.
Her face, sculpted with delicate elegance, seed carved from moonlight. Jet-black hair flowed behind her like a dark river against the pale blue sky.
Her ocean-hued eyes shimred with intelligence and purpose, filled with a mix of sorrow and determination. Her presence was a whisper in reality, both there and not, gliding silently over the forgotten land.
She was not here by accident.
Duskholm—the town over which she now soared—was the sa forsaken place Einar had once visited during his fateful journey with that ragtag group of rcenaries. The sa place where they encountered him.
Skin.
Now, the town lay utterly abandoned. Not a soul stirred. Not even pests skittered through the crooked alleys or beneath the warped floorboards. Life had been bled dry from this place, like ink drained from parchnt.
Once, Duskholm had retained so semblance of order—dilapidated but standing, brittle but alive. But now? Now it was a corpse of stone and timber.
The buildings were crumbling, windows shattered, doors unhinged. Cracks webbed across the stone roads like dry riverbeds, and the scent of rot lingered in the air.
Leiruat hovered midair, her translucent form glowing faintly. Her brows furrowed as she surveyed the town.
Confusion flickered in her gaze.
’What happened here?’
But then again, she reminded herself—this was Ebon’s domain. A realm twisted by a madman whose sense of reality bent like molten steel.
His realm, his rules. Whatever grotesque deterioration had befallen this land was not her concern.
Not today.
She wasn’t here to mourn the dead or investigate the corruption.
She was here for answers.
Her friend—her sister in all but blood—was gone. Skin had told her she’d been sacrificed. But Leiruat couldn’t believe it. No... refused to believe it.
The woman in question had been the one who bestowed the Blessing of Immortality to the Aetherion bloodline.
A being revered, prayed, and exalted. The very idea that such a person could be "sacrificed" felt ridiculous. Implausible.
Unreal.
But Skin... Skin had insisted. His words were riddled with half-truths and madness.
Ness. The corrupted being that Skin claid to be a fragnt of.
She didn’t buy it.
To believe Skin was to believe in madness. He was broken, corrupted. A puppet of darker forces. To trust him was to invite damnation.
But the part about Ebon—that, she could accept.
Ebon was known far and wide as a recluse. An eccentric entity of power whose realm danced on the edge of the Aetherion border.
A land brimming with spiritual energy, powerful artifacts, and mysteries so ancient even ti forgot their nas.
And the supposed reason for his descent into obsession?
His wife—Priscila.
That was believable. His possessiveness over her, his desperate attempts to preserve her, protect her, own her... all of that was consistent with the Ebon she rembered.
So, with all that in mind, she had co.
Not to wage war.
Not to condemn or punish.
But to find the truth.
To find her.
With renewed focus, Leiruat increased her speed, slicing through the sky like a cot of silver mist. Duskholm vanished behind her as she moved deeper into Ebon’s domain.
Beyond the dead town, another settlent appeared on the horizon. This one was vibrant, almost unnervingly so.
Flowers blood on windowsills. Laughter echoed faintly in the distance. Birds flitted from rooftop to rooftop, and townsfolk wandered the streets.
But to Leiruat’s senses, it was all wrong.
Utterly, irrevocably wrong.
She could feel it—the hollowness that seeped beneath the illusion of peace.
The people here were hosts. Vessels of parasitic worms. She had seen them before in other border realms—monstrosities that murdered their hosts, reconstructed their corpses from the inside out, and animated them like grotesque dolls.
They spoke in familiar voices. Mimicked old habits. Even laughed in a way that sounded almost human.
But they weren’t.
They were hollow shells puppeteered by writhing abominations.
To the untrained eye, they were rely eccentric townsfolk. But Leiruat saw the subtle signs—the rigid postures, the lack of emotional variance, the eerie synchronicity in their movents.
They couldn’t express nuanced emotions.
Couldn’t speak in depth.
They were automatons wearing the skin of the dead.
She hovered above them, watching, her gaze unreadable. They were not her mission. Not yet. But this deception confird one thing.
Ebon’s realm was crumbling—not just physically, but spiritually. Whatever threads held this illusion together were fraying fast.
And the truth she sought?
Lay deeper still.
She would find it.
No matter what she had to face.
No matter what secrets this decaying world tried to bury.
With her mind resolute and her path clear, Leiruat glided silently across the skies of the unsettlingly peaceful town.
The veil of illusion below her was nothing more than a curtain over a stage of horror. Every step she took further into Ebon’s realm brought with it a subtle weight—a pressure in the air, in her spirit, in her very soul.
And then, it happened.
Without warning, the sky itself dimd.
Not simply as if clouds had rolled in or twilight had arrived early—but as though the world had been drowned in ink.
A suffocating blanket of pitch-black darkness descended upon the realm like a collapsing do, extinguishing the last rays of light.
Her breath caught.
The air shimred with unseen malice, the stillness ruptured by an oppressive energy that pressed against her being.
’This isn’t... darkness,’ she thought sharply, narrowing her eyes as the pressure mounted.
No, it wasn’t the lifeless, voidless darkness that ca with the absence of light. This was sothing else entirely. The darkness pulsed. It breathed. It lived.
It was not a shadow, but a sentient veil—writhing, twisting, brimming with malicious vitality. It wasn’t simply the lack of light, but the presence of sothing far worse. Sothing unknowable.
Sothing hungry.
Her mind whispered a na before she even fully realized it.
Voidhart.
A primordial force. A living abyss.
A sentient anomaly that fed on existence itself, warping dinsions like paper, fracturing reality with a re thought.
And with that realization, a shiver ran down her spine.
Ebon was a Voidhart.
That explained it all—the anomalies, the warped realm, the false town populated with flesh-puppets, the fractures of space.
The God of Malevolence.
A deity who feasted on ti and space, whose presence alone twisted the laws of existence.
And yet, it made a twisted kind of sense. Who else but a Voidhart could shape an entire domain into a distorted reflection of his psyche? Who else could weave such complex illusions while simultaneously eroding the fabric of the world?
Leiruat let out a breathless chuckle, cold and sardonic.
"Well... guess there’s no turning back now."
The thought ca bitterly. The realm had been sealed behind her the mont the veil fell. There would be no retreat, no flight, no clever escape. Only one path remained.
She would have to face Ebon.
And hope—pray—that he was in a talkative mood.
But as if mocking her fleeting optimism, reality trembled.
The veil scread.
Not with sound, but with sensation. The void convulsed, and in an instant, it ruptured.
She didn’t even have the ti to widen her eyes.
In a single breath, the darkness devoured her.
No resistance. No warning. The world vanished.
And then—
Light.
Her senses returned with a violent jolt.
She gasped, stumbling slightly as her feet touched sothing solid. Cool air brushed against her face. The oppressive darkness was gone—replaced by ambient light and the serene hum of stillness.
She blinked rapidly, trying to process her surroundings.
She was no longer in the sky. No longer above the cursed town.
She stood within a vast chamber, walls of polished marble rising in sweeping arcs. The architecture was ancient yet pristine, adorned with intricate carvings that seed to shift and ripple if stared at too long.
The room glowed faintly with golden hues, ambient and surreal, casting long shadows that didn’t always behave as they should.
It was a sanctuary pulled from dreams—or nightmares.
The silence was not comforting, but pregnant with power. The kind of silence that could crush a person’s spirit if they dared speak too loudly within it.
Her gaze shifted to the center of the chamber—and froze.
On an elevated bed of obsidian and silk lounged a man, tall and statuesque, his very presence exuding a primordial dread.
He appeared young, his form handso and composed, but the mont one’s eyes t his, the illusion shattered. Behind those dark irises lay storms—ti-bending whirlpools of madness and knowledge.
His raven-black hair cascaded loosely, and his limbs rested lazily as if the very world bent to his convenience.
Ebon.
The Voidhart himself.
But that wasn’t what truly made Leiruat’s breath hitch.
Curled beside him like a feline, head resting against his chest, was a girl with soft brown hair and serene features.
Priscila.
Her body looked unblemished. Alive. But her aura... it was faint, flickering. It clung to Ebon’s like moonlight swallowed by the sea.
And then Ebon moved.
He tilted his head slowly, those abyssal eyes locking onto Leiruat with an intensity that made the air itself thicken.
And then... he smiled.
A cold, knowing, eerie smile.
"You’re welco here," he said, his voice a lody laced with discord, echoing slightly though the chamber was enclosed.
"Tauriel," he added, the na rolling off his tongue like a challenge. "Deity of Love."
Leiruat flinched.
He knew.
He rembered.
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