"And if I refuse?" Damon asked.
The reply came fast, almost as soon as the words left his mouth, the entity spoke, as if the answer was the most obvious thing in existence.
"You die, naturally"
A moment of silence filled the dark chamber.
The options were simple: Listening and trusting in the odd entity before him or dying in stubbornness.
At first glance, the choice seemed rather obvious.
And yet, despite that obvious choice, something about this situation didn’t sit right with Damon.
Why did it need him in the first place?
At the same moment, Damon remembered that it had been mentioned awaiting him, which naturally raised another question.
Why did it have to wait?
"I refuse," Damon suddenly replied.
The entity’s figure didn’t change or move even the slightest. And yet, without moving even a muscle, the atmosphere in the entire chamber shifted in an instant.
"Human," The entity’s voice didn’t rise. Mostly because it didn’t need to. "You have barely scratched the surface of the truth. I am offering you a chance to transcend your mortal self and reach heights no human has ever reached. Refusing me would be equivalent to refusing existence itself."
Damon shrugged. "I refuse either way,"
A silence stretched between them, the kind that had weight to it, the kind that pressed against the chest. The figure on the throne didn’t move. Didn’t shift. The shadows that comprised its armour curled slowly, like smoke from a dying fire.
Then, almost as if it had been alive, it exhaled.
"Interesting."
That was all it said. There was no reaction of surprise or any feeling of hostility. Just a faint trace of amusement which faded with the figure’s next move, as if Damon’s choice was nothing but a meaningless inconvenience in the grand scale of things.
The figure lifted its gauntleted hand and turned it, palm up, as though offering something invisible.
"We shall meet again, human. Not because I will bring you here." The hand lowered. "But because all the paths end here regardless of what choice you make."
Damon held its gaze, or what passed for one behind that lightless visor.
"Then I’ll deal with it when I get there."
The next scratch of silence was shorter than the last. As if the entity before him was getting accustomed to his quick wittedness and found less need to process his replies.
Somewhere from behind the darkness of its greathelm, something shifted. It wasn’t quite amusement or respect. Something in between that had no name in any mortal tongue.
"Leave."
The chamber didn’t collapse so much as it simply stopped. The obsidian walls, the vaulted ceiling, the throne and the figure upon it, all of it folded inward like a flame being snuffed, and the darkness swallowed everything whole.
The darkness, however, didn’t last long before a sudden light pierced Damon’s vision and a faint breeze of earth’s air brushed against his dark hair.
Damon’s first breath came back to him like a door being kicked open.
He lurched upright with a sharp gasp, his hands flying to his chest where the wound had been, finding nothing but intact skin beneath torn fabric. The sky above him was blue, like it should’ve been. The kind he hadn’t fully appreciated until just now.
He barely had time to process it before something slammed into him.
Nyla.
She hit him at full force, arms locked around his neck, nearly knocking him flat again. She didn’t say anything at first, she just held on, her shoulders trembling with the particular movement of someone who had been holding tears in place through sheer stubbornness and had finally, gratefully, given up.
"You idiot," she said eventually, her voice muffled against his shoulder. "You absolute idiot."
"Good to see you too," Damon said.
She pulled back just long enough to look at him, really look, like she was checking every part of his face for damage, before pulling him in again.
Over her shoulder, Damon found Ivy.
She was still kneeling where she’d been, and she hadn’t moved to close the distance between them. She didn’t need to. The smile on her face did that well enough on its own, wide and unguarded and completely without pretence, the kind of smile that had nothing to prove.
"The quest?" Damon asked.
In reply, Nyla let out a victorious laugh while Ivy’s smile somehow widened.
For a moment, just a moment, everything was still. The ruined battlefield, the scorched earth, the shattered stone. None of it mattered. The three of them existed briefly in the quiet of something calm, something serene, and it felt like enough.
Then the world cracked.
A deafening sound cut through the entire world. It resonated deep inside their bones and rattled everything around them, so loud and enormous it felt like the sound of a dying world.
Their gazes snapped across their surroundings, their eyes slightly disoriented from the deafening sound which lingered long past its arrival.
Then, their eyes finally looked up and what they saw sent shivers down their spines.
Above them, the sky split open.
It wasn’t a simple parting of clouds or even a distortion of reality done by rifts. This was different, a clean, deliberate seam opened across the blue sky, from one horizon to the next and through that seam poured a light so bright it made the sun look like an afterthought.
And through that light, something descended.
It fell slowly.
It had eight white-feathered wings that flapped too slowly to keep it up, yet it manipulated the air to its liking. A long white cloak draped across its slender, almost skeleton-like figure, decorated with golden ornaments that extended toward the top where a golden great helm with no visor or opening was.
Calling its skin pale would be an understatement, it was whiter than anything white Damon had seen before, as if the colour had a completely different meaning now.
But more oppressive than its eerie looks was the aura it emanated.
It was visible, rays of brilliance pressed around it as if it could oppress reality itself, curving around it in an enormous oval shape and shifting with each second.
The three of them stood shoulder to shoulder and watched it descend toward them without a word between them.
In Damon’s head, the warning of the entity he met earlier echoed.
He had no idea what those words meant then but now, he was starting to realise that he was about to find out.