The long-ago powerful command resonated through the still chaos, freezing the fabric of their broken world. "Enough." The folding realities, sealed at their primaeval peak of folding, quivered violently, then suddenly firmed into solid crystal, its frantic energies crystallised in statu. Colours frozen mid-twirl, creating breathtaking but impossible gradients; shattered landscapes frozen suspended like shattered ornaments in a heavenly spectacle; and all three of them – Elara, Caius, and the figure – were frozen in an exquisite yet awe-inspiring crystalline structure. It was a still image of shattered worlds, a frozen tapestry of broken vows and lingering love, a moment frozen outside the normal flow of time.
The new voice, resonating with an authority that transcended even Aethel's arrogant pronouncements, spoke again, but more softly this time, yet with the unspeakable weight of centuries. "You have disturbed the delicate balance, a harmony spun on innumerable threads of being. You have awakened what was to rest for millennia, invoking forces that are best left alone."
Elara, frozen in crystalline stillness, her outstretched hand hovering a hair's breadth from the frigid, iced fingers of the figure, felt an overwhelming feeling of disorientation, a discomfiting disconnect with the turbulent chaos that had so very recently surrounded them. The unnatural silence within the crystal cage appeared to contrast and so emphasise the wild, erratic thud of her own heart, with each beat a harrowing reminder of her present situation. She could see Caius, frozen in mid-reach, his face a faceless mask of concern and savage protectiveness, his eyes burning on her with unyielding intensity. Sitting opposite her, the figure, still his eyes burning with a desperate, unflagging love, was frozen too, a grief and longing carved into stone.
"Who… who did that?" She breathed, her voice a breathless whisper suspended in the crystal-filled air, an effort doomed to fail under the suffocating silence.
The voice, a sound as though from the crystal form itself, a vibration in the very material of their ice world, answered, its timbre worn and weary, as the breath of an abandoned god. "I am the keeper. The weaver of the thin strands of reality, who maintains the cosmic loom. You, little sparks of chaos, have crossed them, with the potential to unravel the entire pattern."
Caius, though his physical form was constrained within crystal bonds, strained against his non-corporeal prison, his muscles bunched, his eyes locked on Elara, an unspoken whirlpool of questions, wariness, and staunch love flowing back and forth between the two of them. He tried to speak, forming silent syllables with locked lips, but the crystal held his voice, his silent struggle a testament to his ferocious defence.
The man, his gaze never wavering from Elara's, appeared to speak with the very ferocity of his look, a silent cry for understanding, a hopeless reiteration of shattered vows, and a hunger that transcended the sealed moment.
"What balance have we upset?" Elara's thoughts whirled, striving frantically to grasp the extent of what they had done. "What ancient power was meant to sleep? And what role do we serve in its awakening?"
The guardian's voice, the rustling of dry leaves carried on an eternally still breeze, filled the crystalline air, its tone as thick as a note of sorrow, a lament for a world on the brink. "The tendrils of the void reach too far, its polluting strength spreading to places where it was not meant to wander. The screams of broken vows reverberate throughout the endless realities, sending shockwaves of chaos. Aethel's birth was premature, a tear in the fabric of chronology. And now this mad convergence, this crash course of worlds, threatens to unravel all that ever was, is, and can ever be."
Elara's gaze fell back to the form. He loved her, alive in his heart, thrumming through the crystalline stillness, a burst of fire in the frozen wasteland. But the terms of his return were impossible, a violation of life and death's own rules, a ghost from a long-lost past jarringly shoved into her world.
"Who are you?" she asked, asking the question with all mental strength to the figure, an inner question across the barrier of crystal. "Why do you feel so achingly familiar, like a half-forgotten dream?"
There was a flicker of profound emotion over the rigid face of the figure, a fleeting shadow of sorrow which for a moment concealed the all-desperate love in his eyes. He seemed to try to say something, a wordless struggle against his crystalline confinement, his lips struggling in a silent appeal, but the crystal held his words captive, his wordless torment a duplicate of her own confusion.
The voice of the guardian interrupted, pitched with a tang of antique grief, a grief for broken connections. "He is a fragment of a time before the shattering, before the rot of the void's own decay. A soul bound to yours by vows more ancient than memory, pledges written upon the very fabric of existence. A side effect of the caress of the void, an anomaly in the shattered timeline."
Elara's heart ached with a sudden, piercing stab of profound loss, a feeling she couldn't quite place, a ghost limb of forgotten love. The comforting heat of the form resonated deep within her, calling up shadows of a love she couldn't recall, a haunting melody of broken vows.
"The vows", she thought, the words a key opening a secret door in her mind, a whisper from an outdated past. "The forgotten vows… they bind us all in knots that I don't get."
Aethel's weakened, desperate, fear-filled voice echoed through the crystal cage, a deadly hiss that broke the fragile silence. "Don't listen to it! It's a liar! It would deceive you and break the true and eternal bond between us, a bond cemented in power and destiny!"
Elara winced internally, a shudder of distaste rising through her. Aethel's jealousy was suffocating, a cold grip of the controlling type compared to the yearning gentleness in the guardian's eyes.
"What do you want of me?" Elara asked aloud of the guardian, the voice of reason behind it trying to beg.
"Why have you placed us in glass like this?
"To see," replied the guardian, its voice distant and detached, as if it were a scholar reading old books. "To know the nature of the ties that hold you three. To know if this random coming together can be averted, if the entangled strands of reality can be untied, or if all must be unravelled, returned to the silent nothing from which it started."
The figure's eyes blazed, a silent, frantic urging to remember, to choose him, to re-seize what they had lost. Caius, lying still, looked at them with unyielding ferocity, his passion for Elara a living thing that cut across the crystal wall, a silent vow to protect her.
Elara hurt with a deep feeling of being torn in two, a difficult tug between a love she hardly recalled, a shadow of a life she couldn't fathom, and the vibrant, actual love of her life now with Caius. The weight of promises she'd never uttered dragged at her, a quiet and motionless weight on her heart, an icy reminder of a life that didn't exist in her memories.
As the guardian observes them in the crystal quiet, the figure, in spite of his frozen condition, achieves a small, barely perceptible movement. His frozen fingers twitch, a tiny spasm of rebellion in the crystalline prison, and one tear, glinting with an age-old, unearthly light, slips from his eye, travelling slowly and deliberately down his crystalline cheek. And in that single, glittering tear, Elara sees a brief, vivid image – a sunrise shared staining an ancient landscape, a promise whispered beneath a night sky, and a blood oath, the same as the sigil in her palm, being etched upon stone, binding two hearts for all time.