The tear in reality widened, a void chasm boiling with darkness, dark tendrils reaching out like grasping hands. Asher stepped back instinctively, all of him shrieking run. But he wouldn't go. Shadows curled about his fists, clenched and ready.
Ardyn, being a pragmatic one, already had his blades drawn. "Yeah, I don't like this," he snarled, falling into a guard.
Neither did Asher.
The presence that seeped between the crevice was one he had never experienced. The Architect had been grand, divine, powerful. This. this creature was something different. Not human. Not divine. Other.
Then it changed.
A shape formed—a massive form covered in writhing darkness, its face hidden behind a shifting void. The air around it chilled, as if the very fabric of time recoiled to be where it was.
A thought—no, a voice—shoved against Asher's mind, unsaid, but forced upon him.
"You are on the verge of something more. and yet, you are so trivial."
Asher ground his teeth. "And yet, you're cowering behind cryptic whispers."
The figure laughed—a harsh, dusty voice that sent cracks scuttling across the shattered stone.
"Your folk always battle. Charges the darkness. But you are not the first, nor will you be the last, to fall before the inevitable."
The Abyss Hungers.
The monster attacked.
Asher barely had time to react. Dark stuff shot out of his hands as he blinked off to the side, dodging the first tendril of darkness that slammed into the ground where he'd just been. The stone beneath it didn't so much shatter—it was non-existent, consumed as if it never existed in the first place.
Ardyn swore, kicking back up onto the knocked-over pillar. "Yep. Don't really want to get smacked by that."
The thing curled around them, its shape changing with unnatural fluidity. Then it blew out—tendrils bursting in a whirlwind storm.
Asher pushed back, his own nothing power clashing with it, but the instant they blended, his energy faltered. The creature's darkness wasn't just devouring—it was digesting.
"Your power is on borrowed fragments," the voice pushed against his mind. "But I am the source. The abyss itself. You do not know how to wield what you do not comprehend."
Searing pain flashed through his head. His link to the void faltered—unstable. His own power was turning against him.
For the first time since entering this cursed Cathedral, raw doubt attacked him.
Was this a battle he could even win?
"Asher!" Ardyn's voice snapped him back. "If you're gonna come up with a plan, now would be great!"
The entity moved again, faster this time. A dozen tendrils lashed toward them, and Asher barely managed to twist his body, his shadow-step carrying him out of the way.
But Ardyn wasn't as lucky.
A tendril sliced him at mid-dodge, and he crashed into debris. A strangled guttural cry tore from his lips, body twisting as black tendrils ensnared his arms, pulling him toward the void.
"Shit—" Asher didn't think. He acted, quicker than he'd ever moved in his life, his hands bursting into voidfire as he swung a huge arc and chopped the tendrils. The creature stumbled back, an earsplitting scream ripping through the very air itself.
Ardyn's hack, his breath catching as Asher pulled him to standing. "That. hurt," he managed in a wheeze.
"Stand back," Asher growled, moving forward. He thought frantically. If his void magic wouldn't work, he'd have to resort to something else.
The Architect's energy had lingered, the aftereffect of their divine power still active in the broken sigils that surrounded them. Asher concentrated, reaching—not into the void, but into that.
A spark of bridge.
His fingers touched the residual remnants of creation itself.
And for the first time in history, the darkness faltered.
The creature paused.
"What are you doing?"
Asher smiled, his brow dripping with sweat. "Learning."
Then, he assaulted.