Chapter Ninteen: Paradox and Phoenix Part. 1
Luciana hovered in the void, surrounded by the four Sepideus.
Beneath them, Doran's body floated—still, suspended, and unmoving.
His flames had frozen mid-burst. Time no longer seemed to touch him.
Crystalline frost etched across his limbs, threading over his ribs and lips like a crown of stillborn fire.
The stars blinked in silence.
Watching.
Waiting.
Luciana's voice broke the stillness—sharp as a sword, soft as snowfall.
"Now leave. Death has words he would like to share with the mortal."
Her tone was a paradox itself—commanding, yet gentle.
A deity who didn't raise her voice because the universe bent to her whisper.
For a heartbeat, none of them moved.
Then—
Reluctantly—
Vask uncoiled backward.
His snake-arm twitched in quiet disapproval, tongue flicking against the void.
His body dissolved into the spiral of his own tail.
The tail shattered like glass.
He was gone.
Theryn followed. A faint click pulsed from his mechanical hand as he stepped through a shimmer of pale gold, his silhouette breaking into thin strands of circuitry and dust.
Neyta stayed a moment longer.
Her eyes locked on Doran.
Something unreadable passed across her face.
Sympathy?
Regret?
Recognition?
She blinked.
Gone.
Only Daegryn remained.
Luciana didn't look at him.
Her ember eyes remained fixed on Doran—his body frozen in a chrysalis of stalled fire and ice. She studied him not with awe, but with calculation. Like a god appraising a creature that had no business existing.
"And why did you stay?" she asked. Her voice was still. Measured.
"Something you forgot to tell me?"
Daegryn chuckled softly.
The rings around his arms dimmed, then collapsed inward—vanishing into the folds of his coat like whispers returning to silence.
"You see right through me."
Luciana didn't respond.
But her silence tightened the void like a noose.
Even Daegryn shifted.
Still, he floated forward—one hand casually in his coat pocket, the other tracing idle, invisible sigils through the air. The movements meant nothing. Or maybe everything.
"When I first encountered this one," he said, nodding toward Doran,
"I thought he was Avon."
He laughed once under his breath.
"Before Avon got to him."
Luciana's gaze didn't move.
Didn't blink.
Didn't soften.
"So you made a mistake?"
"Not a mistake," Daegryn murmured. "I asked Forgotten. It wasn't an accident."
He pointed to Doran, his finger suspended like a thread of fate.
"This one… is in every timeline."
At that, Luciana's eyes narrowed.
But still—she said nothing.
Daegryn's smile thinned, no longer playful.
"I didn't believe it either. So I tested it."
"Again. And again."
He drifted slowly around Doran, orbiting like a cruel moon around a sleeping star.
"Even in timelines where Avon never existed… this one still did. Different names. Different scars. Same soul."
Luciana finally spoke—her voice quieter than before, and colder.
"You're saying he's a constant."
Daegryn stopped.
Faced her.
"I'm saying, that something older than Death placed him on our game board."
Luciana blinked.
Once.
Behind her, the stars dimmed.
Daegryn smiled, softer now. No longer as mad. Almost… respectful.
He dipped his head slightly—not mockery, not servitude.
Reverence.
"That's all I wanted to say."
Then—
Without fanfare, without light, without heat—
He unraveled.
His body split into six thin rings of smoke.
Each drifted upward and vanished with a sound like memory breaking.
A faint chime.
And he was gone.
Luciana was alone with Doran.
She did not move.
Did not speak.
She simply watched.
The ice continued its slow bloom across his chest—vein-like and deliberate. A false heartbeat. A frozen breath. Even the void held still, as if waiting for her to make the first move.
Her flame-colored eyes traced every flicker of him. Not in awe.
In curiosity.
In wariness.
"Every timeline…" she whispered.
The words barely escaped her lips.
She extended a single finger—pale and unnaturally smooth—toward his forehead.
But she did not touch.
Not yet.
"You've caused quite the stir, little paradox."
Then—
Her fingertip met his skin.
A tremor, soundless and deep, rippled through the vacuum.
No explosion. No light.
Just… a shift.
As if something had just been made aware of their presence.
Luciana drew her hand back slowly.
And for the first time—
Her eyes darkened.
Her ember glow faded into grey.
Her skin went pale, spectral, colorless.
She didn't speak.
She simply drifted backward, as if pushed by an unseen tide.
Then—
Like dust in the wind—
She was gone.
And Doran was left alone.
Nothing around him now but the void—cold, vast, eternal.
Then—
A twitch.
His fingers moved.
The frost along his knuckles cracked and flaked away, drifting beside his motionless body like shattered glass in weightless ballet.
Another twitch.
His whole body this time.
More ice broke off in silent fragments, orbiting him like discarded shells.
The flames—once frozen in their arc—suddenly erupted.
A pulse.
A burst.
Silent, but absolute.
They rippled outward like a dying star's final breath, threading light through the vacuum. Reds. Oranges. A flicker of indigo.
But Doran did not wake.
Not fully.
He hovered—eyes shut, breath suspended, skin glowing faintly beneath soot and frost—as if caught between moments, between selves.
The fire spiraled away in slow, radiant ribbons.
Then—
The stars blinked out.
One by one.
Not extinguished.
Withdrawn.
As if the cosmos itself refused to watch.
The hum of potential in the void—gone.
And in that sacred pause—
He arrived.
Not with step.
Not with light.
But with absence.
A silhouette formed from smoke that drank the dark.
It bled into the void—not disturbing it, but completing it.
A figure that erased lines, blurred borders, unmade space.
Tall.
Narrow.
Unfinished.
A sketch drawn in reverse.
Death.
Not in metaphor.
Not in symbol.
In truth.
He drifted forward—not floating, not flying—simply closer, as though distance had decided to surrender.
His outline rippled like soaked parchment, his form dissolving and reconstituting with every passing breath of the void. Behind him trailed green and purple energy, coiling like memory-fed serpents.
They hung in the air. Not alive.
But alert.
"Awaken."
Death's voice was a cathedral bell long unrung—deep, resonant, final.
No echo followed.
There was no room for defiance in that tone.
It was not sound.
It was command.
Doran's spine arched.
His eyes snapped open—light surged into his lungs, not air, light.
Flame erupted from his skin, peeling away frost, burning away silence.
And he saw it.
The figure before him.
And what he saw—
Was everything.
And nothing.
A form his soul recognized but his senses refused.
A silhouette made of sorrowed shadow, darker than space, older than endings.
A wound in reality that had learned to stand.
All Doran could feel—
Was Death.
Not his own.
But the pain.
The grief.
The sorrow of billions of lives ending.
Old. Young. Innocent. Forgotten. All of it—pressed against his soul like a flood searching for cracks.
He couldn't breathe.
Couldn't scream.
Couldn't move.
The green and purple tendrils of energy coiled tighter around the shadowed figure. They twisted like vines with purpose, like memories dressed as chains.
"Just as I began to grow tired of our meetings," Death said, voice smooth as eroded stone, "you became more important than I could have imagined."
Doran tried to speak.
Tried to lift his hand.
But it was like remembering how to move a body you no longer owned.
He couldn't.
Because he wasn't supposed to.
Death leaned closer—not with motion, but inevitability.
"Imagine restarting everything…"
"And still encountering the same person. Same face. Same rage. Same scars."
Each word rang like a chisel tapping into the oldest bones of the world.
"I thought it was fate the first time. Coincidence the second. But by the third…"
The voice didn't grow louder.
It descended—slipping into the marrow of Doran's being like a forgotten truth.
"I realized something was wrong."
Doran's body trembled.
Not from fear.
Not from pain.
But from contradiction.
The flame inside him surged—screaming with purpose.
But the soul—
The soul splintered.
Doubt laced through it like cracks in stained glass.
And Death—
Death only watched.
He did not blink.
He did not sigh.
He did not judge.
"I even tried to remove you from a cycle altogether," he said, his voice rippling through Doran like pressure remembered by gravity. "Because I was sick of seeing you. It was stale."
A flicker of green arced across Death's form—
Not lightning.
But memory.
Too old to forget how to strike.
"But that may prove to be my greatest mistake."
Behind him, the serpents of energy hissed.
Not in anger.
In warning.
They twisted and writhed like locked-away thoughts clawing at the walls of a vault long sealed.
Death did not sigh.
He had no breath to waste.
But something heavy settled between them.
"And now, the reason for this meeting."
His voice did not rise. It simply was. Like gravity—unspoken, undeniable.
"We will make an exchange of flames… allowing you to become stable. Closer to whole."
At those words, Doran's flame twitched.
Not from power.
But from recognition.
Or perhaps… fear.
Death lifted his hands to his chest—and the space parted.
Not torn.
Not ripped.
But opened.
The void understood.
It yielded.
From between Death's palms, a flame emerged.
No bigger than a heart.
But heavier than a star.
It pulsed like Doran's—but deeper.
Steadier.
Complete.
The moment it appeared, Doran's flame recoiled.
Then surged.
Drawn to something it couldn't name—
But had always known.
The two fires began to spiral.
Green and gold.
Violet and white.
They twisted toward one another like lovers separated by centuries of silence.
"You are unstable," Death said, "because you house two reflections of the same soul. They do not belong together. They fight."
"What I offer is not power. Not mercy. Not salvation."
"It is foundation."
The space bent around him—subtle, reverent.
And Death hovered closer.
In his hands, the ancient flame shimmered without light.
It did not burn.
It did not warm.
It pulled.
Doran's chest split—internally, invisibly.
His ribs no longer agreed with each other.
His two souls clawed for dominance.
And through their chaos, the third flame waited.
"You will encounter four of the godly family before we meet again," Death said.
"Until then…"
A third arm slipped from the silhouette—
Smooth as ink, slow as certainty—
And reached for the flame.
It pressed it into Doran's chest.
And his soul—
His souls—
Reacted.
They screamed.
Silent.
Feral.
They thrashed against each other and the flame—
Until they didn't.
Until they let go.
The fire around Doran unraveled
Each strand of flame was drawn toward Death—spun into the mist like thread into a god-forged loom.
"One of the Flame's Souls," Death intoned, "in exchange for the Flame's Body."
Doran's eyes flared wide.
Not in pain.
Not in awe.
But in stillness.
He felt it.
Control.
A rhythm no longer out of sync.
A heartbeat that knew its place.
For the first time since Avon brought him back, he felt… whole.
The stars began to return—
One by one.
Like a sky remembering it could shine.
"Just keep going," Death whispered, his voice thinning like dusk into night, "and don't let that bird control you."
Then—
He vanished.
No burst.
No sound.
Just absence unfolding.
The green and purple serpents spiraled once, brushing Doran's form like a final touch.
Then faded.
Doran was alone.
And from the silence of nowhere and everywhere—
Death's final words cracked across reality like glass remembering how to shatter:
"My apologies…Move."
Elsewhere
Avon
Drifting.
Disassembled.
Memory curled in on itself, devouring meaning.
There was no ground.
No sky.
No gravity.
Just a smear of black and thought.
And even that was thinning.
He tried to remember the sound of fire.
Nothing.
He tried to feel rage.
Nothing.
All that remained was the echo.
A voice.
A whisper with no mouth. "If you want to escape… you'll have to find the door out."
He didn't know how long it had been since he'd first heard it.
Maybe it had never stopped.
Maybe it was the void now.
A velvet tongue, laced in mockery, slithering through the folds of his fading mind.
His body?
A ghost.
His wings? Gone.
His flame? Flickering.
Sometimes gold. Sometimes blue.
Sometimes… not at all.
His breath came heavy.
Sporadic.
A habit his body hadn't fully let go of.
And before him—
A Wyrm.
Cracked scales.
Mouth rimmed with teeth like broken glass.
Purple energy pulsing beneath its skin like veins full of lightning.
It didn't roar at first.
It seethed.
Avon turned—or thought he turned—lurching away in a half-run, half-stumble. "Damn bird legs!" he cursed, as he limped faster.
The Wyrm charged, a ripple of violet energy surged behind it.
Avon chanced a glance over his shoulder—
The Wyrm's jaws were a breath away.
Instinct took over.
He dropped into a slide—
Gliding beneath the beast as its mouth snapped shut above him, fangs missing his skull by inches.
He rolled once, twice, and came to a halt, chest heaving.
The ground—if it could be called that—didn't exist.
It was just… the idea of movement.
Of falling.
Without ever touching anything.
Behind him, the Wyrm roared again—
Or maybe it didn't.
Maybe it vanished.
Or maybe it was ahead now.
Wearing a different shape.
He couldn't tell anymore.
He couldn't trust this place.
Or himself.
His flame flickered again—
Gold.
Blue.
Then—black.
The void behind him folded like wet paper—soft, sudden, and wrong.
The Wyrm's roar unraveled into something else.
Laughter.
Not echoing.
Dripping.
Like thought melting down the inside of his skull, pooling into places memory couldn't hold.
The laughter thinned.
Reality stretched—
Then snapped.
A crack split the blackness.
Not light.
Not sound.
Not even space.
Meaning peeled back like skin.
And through it…
Something stepped.
It should not exist.
Too massive.
Too aware.
Its presence dragged gravity behind it like a rusted chain. Veins of black cable and twisted muscle pulsed across its hulking frame—like rotted bark soaked in ichor older than gods.
Its shoulders bowed beneath unseen weight.
Like it carried the ruins of history.
And in its chest—
A single, violet eye.
Perfectly round.
Spinning with threads of time, memory, and something else.
Something watching.
The eye pulsed once.
Avon's flame choked—dying in his throat.
The titan moved.
One step.
The void warped with it—folding, splitting, shrinking under its tread.
Avon staggered back, claws scraping against air that wasn't there, desperate for friction, for anchor. For anything.
The eye began to glow.
Not bright—vast.
A false sunrise.
Purple. Deep. Endless.
Devouring the blackness in one slow breath.
The iris bloomed.
A second eye spiraled open inside the first.
Then—
A third.
"Die."
It wasn't spoken.
It was declared.
Not an order.
Not even wrath.
The titan raised its arm.
Not a limb—
An amalgam.
Stone, memory, metal—woven into something too large for this place.
Its motion was tectonic, a breaking of ideas.
No sound followed. Only the bending of concept.
The snap of boundaries.
The scream of reality behind its eyes.
Avon staggered back.
But there was no back.
Only void.
Only verdict.
"I am not ready—" The words tumbled out, brittle. "I haven't found it—"
He didn't even know what it was.
But the titan's arm came down anyway—
Not to crush.
To take.
It did not strike.
It grabbed.
And the moment it touched him—
He understood the difference.
The arm was not like the rest.
The titan had been cosmic.
This…
This was something else.
Slick.
Wet.
Breathing.
It wasn't stone.
Not metal.
It was flesh—but wrong.
It pulsed in too many rhythms.
Veins that weren't veins.
Muscle that twitched and listened.
Strands writhed across its surface, snapping like frayed wires, twitching in recognition.
This wasn't a god's gesture.
It was a thing's craving.
It grabbed Avon.
Not with power.
With hunger.
The titan's shape melted.
Muscles imploded, folding inward—
Not collapsing, but reversing.
A cathedral of madness buckling beneath the weight of its own sermon.
The violet eye at its chest split—then split again—
Dozens.
Hundreds.
Eyes bloomed like rot across its unraveling mass.
And from the ruin of the titan—
Something worse rose.
This was not evolution.
This was corruption given choreography.
A body stitched from contradiction.
Dripping. Grinning. Crawling.
Mouths that didn't eat.
Eyes that didn't see.
They witnessed.
Every eye fixated on Avon.
Blinking. Twitching. Drinking him in.
His voice cracked, barely audible, "What the hell is going on…"
Then—
UUURRREEECCK!!!
The creature screeched.
It didn't echo.
It clawed.
The sound dragged through his soul like a blade against glass. It dug into bone. Peeled back memory. Scraped at the back of thought like fingernails on truth.
Avon reeled—
Too slow.
The thing hurled him.
He skipped across the non-ground, body tumbling like a discarded prayer on still water.
Each impact was silence made solid.
He crashed.
He rolled.
Then floated.
Momentum gone. Physics forgotten.
The void had grown bored.
His chest rose, fell—
No pattern. No grace.
Flame flickering like a heart that almost remembered what it meant to live.
Behind him, the creature pulsed.
Tendrils twitching.
Teeth yawning open inside eyes.
Eyes blinking inside mouths.
Madness, perfectly awake.
He rose to a knee. Looked up.
The thing was already mid-lunge.
Its limbs didn't follow motion—they simply arrived.
Fiber and sinew, rethreading themselves with every twitch.
Its form rippled with decisions it hadn't made yet.
A dozen eyes tracked him.
A dozen more blinked beneath translucent skin.
UUURRREEECCK—the scream came again.
Sharper.
Hungrier.
Avon ran.
Not with purpose.
Not with hope.
But because terror remembered the path his flame had forgotten.
"Find the door. Find the door."
A tendril lashed past. He ducked. Barely.
Another speared by his ribs—
Not striking, but grazing.
Enough to kiss the flame. To remind it that it could still die.
His side burned with the cold of almost.
Behind him, the creature convulsed—then folded.
It collapsed into itself, a knot of hunger and eyes—then reappeared ahead of him.
Upside down.
Inverted.
Still watching.
It existed incorrectly.
Avon's feet caught the nothingness—tripped over pain his body remembered, though his mind tried to forget.
He hit the dark. Scrambled to rise.
The creature was gone.
Only the screech lingered, smeared across the corners of silence.
Then—
The void shifted.
Not suddenly.
Not violently.
Like the air was being exhaled by something massive.
Avon turned.
Looked up.
And up.
And the black peeled away—
Not torn.
Not broken.
Just… removed. Like ink sliding from glass.
What stood beyond it made the titan look like a discarded dream.
It dwarfed meaning.
Its form loomed beyond comprehension—limbs both vine and vein, both pillar and tendon.
A cathedral of writhing mass arched across its back—dragging not stone, but history.
Its movements carried the weight of forgotten dreams,
and its breath was the hush of prayers never spoken.
Its face?
There was no face.
Only a tear.
A vast, vertical wound where a head should be—dripping white light that bled upward, not down.
Hair like threads of shadows unspun.
Arms like roots broken by memory.
And floating before it—hovering like dust before a thundercloud—was Avon.
A phoenix, shrunk to the size of a feather.
A god's mistake staring into something that made gods irrelevant.
The creature didn't move.
It didn't need to.
The void adjusted around it—bent like the spine of a kneeling world.
Space itself compensated. Every ripple whispered its name, though no lips had ever dared shape it.
An entity too large for syllables. Too ancient for titles. Too close for comfort.
"Where the hells am I!?" Avon gasped, his voice cracked and thin. "I was bit by Vask's snake. This—this must be the venom… just a hallucination…"
But he felt it.
The breath in his lungs. The fracture in his soul. The weight of being seen.
And the moment he spoke—just once—
The colossus turned.
Not gradually.
Not instantly.
Inevitably.
The thing did not rotate.
It did not pivot.
It did not shift.
Instead, everything else did.
Reality inverted, like ink being pulled backward into a quill. The void folded around Avon, not with him—tightening like a scroll sealing shut, edges burning with meaning too heavy to hold.
Its head—if such a thing could be called that—tilted.
The vertical tear widened.
Twitched.
Then bloomed.
Inside: nothing.
Not void.
Not shadow.
Not light.
Absence.
The kind of absence that precedes even death.
A hunger without a mouth. A silence that eats noise.
Then—
Click.
A sound.
Small. Precise.
Like a jaw unlocking behind cathedral walls built from bones.
Then again.
Click-click.
Steady. Rhythmic. Final.
It wasn't a threat.
It was a statement.
The sound moved through Avon—not just his ears, but through him.
Each click echoing in his ribs like a forgotten clock remembering time.
He was afraid.
But more than that—
He was curious.
The same way a moth feels heat and still moves closer.
Avon tried to move.
But he couldn't.
Not because he was paralyzed.
But because there was nowhere left to go.
The space he occupied had been devoured.
Reduced.
Inverted.
Boiled down to a single concept.
A single gaze.
Its focus.
That vertical tear—its face—began to unfold.
Not like a flower.
Like a scroll of unspoken language unrolling across the fabric of meaning itself.
Each mark that spilled from it wasn't word or sound, but consequence—engraved truth that did not ask to be understood.
Symbols floated out into the void, searing into the air like sins branded onto time.
Then—
Click.
Click-click.
The cadence returned.
Measured. Precise.
And then—
The hum.
It did not come from the thing's throat.
It did not come from breath.
It came from underneath—beneath the flesh that wasn't flesh. Beneath the idea of form.
A hum too old to have a beginning. Too vast to have a tone.
Low.
Monastic.
Endless.
It reverberated through the bones Avon no longer had—singing in the marrow of his forgotten self.
And still…
The being watched.
No eyes.
No mouth.
Just that vertical, weeping tear—
A maw of non-being so profound, it made Death feel like a footnote in a children's tale.
Then—
The symbols stopped.
All but one.
It hung in the space between Avon and the creature.
A single glyph.
Small. Unblinking.
And hungry.
It did not radiate.
It bled.
Thick, pale lines of ink dripped from its edges—slow, deliberate.
Each drop spiraled mid-air, curling into sigils Avon had never seen… but somehow remembered.
A language not learned.
A language endured.
They etched themselves into the seams of the void—some with the precision of stitches, others like lacerations.
The air pulsed with their weight.
Then—
The bell.
Once.
Twice.
A third time.
Each toll folded the void in tighter around Avon, like fingers curling around a throat too slow to scream.
His wings, long lost, remembered what it meant to ache.
His flame dimmed—shrinking into something small. Something childlike.
And in that shrinking—
He spoke.
Not in defiance.
Not in rage.
In pain and truth.
"…I… I don't want to live anymore."